At some of the later election contests, beginning at Hexham, a new complication had been introduced. During all the years of its existence the old non-militant National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies had held entirely aloof from all election warfare but, seeing that the Suffragettes during the first year of their anti-Government by-election campaigning had rapidly grown not only in surface popularity but in real influence with the electorate, the older Suffragists now came to the conclusion that they, too, must adopt a by-election policy. Unfortunately, however, the older Suffragists had not the courage to make common cause with the Suffragettes who had raised the question of Women's Suffrage from the position of a stale, old-fashioned joke to that of a living, moving force in practical politics. They decided, instead, not to oppose the Government, but to support any Parliamentary candidate who should declare himself to be favourable to Woman Suffrage. If, as generally happened nowadays, all the candidates should claim to be favourable, the N. U. S. S. should either support the most favourable, or remain neutral. In the event of no candidate being favourable, a special Women's Suffrage candidate might be run. Thus, rather than boldly oppose a Government that had only too clearly shown that it would never give women the vote until it was forced to do so, these old-fashioned Suffragists preferred to ignore entirely the dominating principle of the politics of their own time, namely, government by party. They preferred to go on working for the return of a few more of the Private Members of Parliament who, though they already formed a majority of more than two-thirds of the House of Commons, had themselves, for the hundredth time, been proved to be incapable of doing anything to prevent the wrecking of a Women's Suffrage Bill, when, in that very March in which this futile election policy was decided upon, Mr. Dickinson's Bill had been "talked out."