Page:Fraud of Feminism.djvu/171

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been validated.
THE INDICTMENT
167

have been dealt with, is after all only a slight exaggeration of the immunity from all the severer penalties of the law enjoyed by female convicts generally. This has been carried in the case of suffragette criminals to the utmost limits of absurdity. In fact, the deference exhibited towards these deliberate perpetrators of crimes of wanton destruction is sometimes comic, as in the case of the Richmond magistrate who rebuked the policeman-witness in an arson charge for omitting the "Miss" in referring to one of the female prisoners in the dock: as well as in the "high character" usually attributed to the perpetrators of these deeds of outrage and violence even by certain functionaries of Church and State. They did not speak in this strain morebetoken, when mere male anarchists or Fenians were involved in difficulties with the law due to overzeal for their cause!

The whole movement, it is quite evident, depends for its success, largely, at least, on the apathy of men. The bulk of men undoubtedly do not sympathise with the pretensions of the Feminist agitation, but the bulk of men are indifferent one way or the other. They do not take the Feminist Movement seriously. The bare notion of women, as such, being a danger to men as such, strikes them as absurd. They do not realise that the question is not of the physical strength of women as women, but of the whole forces of the State