THE WOMAN'S CAUSE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 170, 5 December 1912, Page 4

THE WOMAN'S CAUSE.

Tbe suffragettes at Home keep getting busier and busier in their efforts to harm their own cause, and their latest "practical protest." ought surely to reach the extreme limit of madness in criminal and vicious folly. Just how their cause can be advanced by the wanton destruction of public property by destroying the contents of pillar-boxes it is difficult to imagine. They may be, and probably are, destroying the correspondence of many of their supporters, and inflicting incalculable annoyance and suffering upon hundreds of people who are either not interested in their agitation or have even approved of their principles whilst abhorring their methods. In the light of their recent methods it is obvious why Mr. and Mrs. Pethick Lawrence severed their. connection with the Women's Social and Political Union when their fellow-leaders, Mrs. and Miss Pankhurst, decided that the campaign of the militant suffragettes should assume "a new phase." They had shared the responsibility for attacks on members of the Government, for the smashing of tradespeople's windows, and even for attempted arson, but they had sufficient common-sense left, in a peculiarly poor season for the commodity, to recoil when the destruction of postal matter was proposed. The Pankhursts are now in control of the extreme section of the suffragists, and they are responsible for tbe outrages which are reported in our cablegrams. Mrs. Pankhurst seems actually to have boasted that the placing of acid in mail boxes, with the object of burning the letters, was the new means of forcing the nation to give votes-to women. The utter silliness of these tactics scarcely calls for serious emphasis. The militant suffragettes are behaving as though they lacked the elementary social instincts as well as all sense of proportion and powers of reason. The effect of their conduct in relation to women's political status is reflected by the fact that thoughtful people will be disposed to suggest restraint rather than punishment in connection with these latest outrages. The women who expect to assist a righteous cause by striking blindly at the users of the mail service cannot be regarded as reasonable beings at all. They are simply not sane, and are setting back their cause, not only among their opponents, whom they arc embittering, but among those who were prepared to concede them the privilege of the franchise, but who are now being forced to consider seriously whether the feminine temperament which finds expression in this asinine manner is really responsible enough to entrust with the right of direct participation in the Government of the country. The hope of getting a Woman's Franchise Bill through the present Parliament appears to have disappeared entirely, while the mass of British women have watched helplessly the outbursts of the small hysterical minority. If ever there was an apt illustration of the philosophy of "Save me from my friends," the women of Britain have realised it in the crass stupidity of the militant suffragettes. They have set back the cause they are allegedly laboring for by years, and alongside their supreme futility the Red Federationists in our midst, amiably imbecile as they are, "don't amount to a circumstance."