"And why is it specially necessary that we should try to stir up this district--whether you like our methods or whether you don't? Because--you have living here among you, one of the worst of the persecutors of women! You have here a man who has backed up every cruelty of the Government--who has denied us every right, and scoffed at all our constitutional demands--your neighbour and great landlord, Sir Wilfrid Lang! I call upon every woman in this district, to avenge women on Sir Wilfrid Lang! We are not out indeed to destroy life or limb--we leave that to the men who are trying to coerce women--but we mean to sweep men like Sir Wilfrid Lang out of our way! Meanwhile we can pay special attention to his meetings--we can harass him at railway stations--we can sit on his doorstep--we can put the fear of God into him in a hundred ways--in short we can make his life a tenth part as disagreeable to him as he can make ours to us. We can, if we please, make it a _burden_ to him--and we intend to do so! And don't let men--or women either--waste their breath in preaching to us of 'law and order.' Slaves who have no part in making the law, are not bound by the law. Enforce it if you can! But while you refuse to free us, we despise both the law and the making of the law. Justice--which is a very different thing from law--Justice is our mistress!--and to her we appeal." Folding her arms, she looked the crowd in the face. They seemed to measure each other; on one side, the lines of upturned faces, gaping youths, and smoking workmen, farmers and cattlemen, women and children; on the other, defying them, one thin, neatly-dressed woman, her face, under the lamps, a gleaming point in the dark. Then a voice rose from a lounging group of men, smoking like chimneys--powerful fellows; smeared with the clay of the brickfields. "Who's a-makin' slaves of you, Ma'am? There's most of us workin' for a woman!" A woman in the middle of the crowd laughed shrilly--a queer, tall figure in a battered hat-- "Aye--and a lot yo' give 'er ov a Saturday night, don't yer?" "Sir Wilfrid's a jolly good feller, miss," shouted another man. "Pays 'is men good money, an' no tricks. If you come meddlin' with him, in these parts, you'll catch it." "An' we don't want no suffragettes here, thank you!" cried a sarcastic woman's voice. "We was quite 'appy till you come along, an' we're quite willin' now for to say 'Good-bye, an' God bless yer!'" The crowd laughed wildly, and suddenly a lad on the outskirts of the crowd picked up a cabbage-stalk that had fallen from one of the market-stalls, and flung it at the waggon. The hooligan element, scattered through the market-place, took up the hint at once; brutal things began to be shouted; and in a moment the air was thick with missiles of various sorts, derived from the refuse of the day's market--vegetable remains of all kinds, fragments of wood and cardboard boxes, scraps of filthy matting, and anything else that came handy.