The Women’s movement, on the other hand, while demanding nothing but the right to the franchise, and claiming this right to a voice in the affairs of the State on the old constitutional ground of Pym and Hampden--that those who pay direct taxation to the government must have some political control of the expenditure--boldly avows in the face of government refusal the necessity for revolutionary methods to acquire the franchise. More than 600 women have gone to prison in the last four years in the cause of Women’s Suffrage, and the methods adopted have startled the public, created an enthusiasm, and generally aroused the attention of a formerly indifferent parliament to the claim of women to political enfranchisement. Mary Wollstonecraft, in her _Vindication of the Rights of Women_, published in 1792, struck the first note of this movement. In the latter half of the nineteenth century it received the support of John Stuart Mill and a certain number of parliamentary radicals, and Women’s Suffrage societies were formed. Then, five years ago, the Women’s Social and Political Union was started at Manchester by Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughter Miss Christabel Pankhurst, and the extraordinary energy and activity of this union and the daring and resource of its members have made the women’s demand for the vote a vital question in politics. Both these movements--the agitation of the Labour Party for a fuller and more abundant life for wage-earners, and the agitation of the women for political enfranchisement are proceeding in our midst--a guarantee that the centuries of struggle for freedom are not fruitless. “The battle of freedom is never done and the field never quiet,” and while ever sun and moon endure and man seeks to dominate his neighbour, so long in England shall men and women be found to resist such dominance. For “to meet such troubles and overcome them, or to die in strife with them--this is a great part of a man’s life.” THE END. FOOTNOTES [1] “By the mouth of the clergy spoke the voice of the helpless, defenceless multitudes who shared with them in the misery of living in a time when law was the feeblest and most untrustworthy stay of right, and men held everything at the mercy of masters, who had many desires and less scruples, were quickly and fiercely quarrelsome, impatient of control, superiority and quiet, and simply indifferent to the suffering, the fear, the waste that make bitter the days when society is enslaved to the terrible fascination of the sword.”--Church, _Saint Anselm_. “Unrestrained by religion, by principle or by policy, with no family interests to limit his greed, extravagance and hatred of his kind, a foul incarnation of selfishness in its most abhorrent form, the enemy of God and man, William Rufus gave to England and Christendom a pattern of absolutism.”--Stubbs, _Constitutional History_. Vol. I.