CHAPTER VI
THE MILITANT SOCIETIES
"It is a calumny on men to say that they are roused to heroic action by ease, hope of pleasure—sugar plums of any kind. In the meanest mortal there lies something nobler. Difficulty, abnegation, martyrdom, death, are the allurements which act upon the heart of man."—Thomas Carlyle.
In Chapters II. and III. an outline was given of the Parliamentary history of women's suffrage between 1867 and 1897. In those thirty years the movement had progressed until it had reached a point when it could count upon a majority of suffragists being returned in each successively elected House of Commons. In 1899 came the South African War, and the main interest of the nation was concentrated on that struggle till it was over. A war almost invariably suspends all progress in domestic and social legislation. Two fires cannot burn together, and the most ardent of the suffragists felt that, while the war lasted, it was not a fitting time to press their own claims and objects. The war temporarily suspended the progress of the suffrage movement, but it is probable that it ultimately strengthened the demand of women for citizenship, for it has been observed again and again that a war, or any other event which stimulates national vitality, and the consciousness of the value of citizenship is almost certain to be followed by increased vigour in the suffrage movement, and not infrequently by its success. For instance, suffrage in Finland in 1907 followed immediately upon the great struggle with Russia to regain constitutional liberty; women as well as men had thrown themselves into that struggle and borne the great sacrifices it entailed, and when Finland wrung from the Czar the granting of the Constitution, women's suffrage formed an essential part of it, and was demanded by the almost unanimous
