intention of his Government to introduce during the coming session (1912) the Electoral Reform Bill, which he had foreshadowed in 1908, that all existing franchises would be swept away, plural voting abolished, and the period of residence reduced. The new franchise was to be based on citizenship, and votes were to be given "to citizens of full age and competent understanding." But no place was found within the four corners of the Bill for the enfranchisement of women. Mr. Asquith reiterated his promise of facilities for the Conciliation Bill, and then merely dismissed the subject of women's suffrage with the remark that his opinions upon it were well known. If it had been his object to enrage every women's suffragist to the point of frenzy, he could not have acted with greater perspicacity. Years of unexampled effort and self-sacrifice had been expended by women to force upon the Government the enfranchisement of women, and when the Prime Minister spoke the only promise he made was to give more votes to men. Mrs. Bernard Shaw exactly expressed the sentiments of women's suffragists, whether militant or non-militant, when she wrote that Mr. Asquith's speech filled her with "an impulse of blind rage"; she felt she had been personally insulted, and that he had said to her in effect "that the vilest male wretch who can contrive to keep a house of ill-fame shall have a vote, and that the noblest woman in England shall not have one because she is a female" (The Times, November 21, 1911).
It is never safe to act under an impulse of blind rage, and very soon a closer knowledge of the actual facts surrounding and explaining the situation brought the conviction home to many of us, indeed it may be stated to the whole body of suffragists with one important exception,[1] that the new situation created by Mr. Asquith's speech, so far from decreasing the chances of success for women's suffrage in 1912 had very greatly strengthened them. First of all we were cheered by
- ↑ The Woman's Social and Political Union dissented from this view. They resumed militant tactics, and scenes of considerable disorder occurred on November 21 and November 29, 1911.
