On December 19th a strange drama was played out in Aberdeen. The Liberal officials of the town, had succeeded in inducing the Suffragettes to promise not to interrupt Mr. Asquith, if he would answer the question of one woman, and they had begged Mrs. Black, the President of the local Women's Liberal Federation, to be the woman. Mrs. Black had agreed "in the interests of peace," as she said. When she rose up to comply with the Liberal official's request, however, she was howled at by their enthusiastic followers in the audience, threatened by the stewards of the meeting, and told by the chairman that she was "out of order," almost as though she had been a real Suffragette. Though at last she succeeded in putting her question, Mr. Asquith replied in snappish and hostile manner. Mr. Alexander Webster, a Unitarian Minister and well known citizen of Aberdeen, a slender, elderly figure, with long grey hair and the face of a saint, was afterwards violently handled for trying to move a women's suffrage rider to the official resolution. Finally Mrs. Pankhurst, who was seated at the back of the hall, rose to explain the situation to the curious and excited audience, and was immediately thrown out of the hall. Then the meeting broke up in disorder. As the _Aberdeen Free Press_ put it, "Many a Liberal left the meeting with the uneasy feeling that the Suffragettes had had the best of it." Nevertheless the Suffragettes were loudly censured for these incidents especially by those who had consistently boycotted the Suffrage question when women had worked quietly for it in the old days. In reply to the critics Dr. George Cooper, an honest Radical and Member of Parliament for Bermondsey, in the course of a letter to the _Daily News_ said: My political life began as a member of the Reform League. It is within my recollection that in 1867 and also in 1884 very few public speakers who were opposed to the extension of the Parliamentary franchise to men, whether members of the Cabinet or otherwise, could utter a single word at a public meeting. Meetings were broken up, platforms stormed and their occupants had to escape the best way they could. In 1884 every Tory speaker used against the extension of the franchise the same arguments now used by some Liberal speakers and newspapers against the extension of the Parliamentary franchise to women.... Why should women be condemned for using the same weapons men found so useful when demanding the vote for themselves?... Cabinet Ministers do not recognise antagonists using any other. There is one fact which cannot be denied. The activity of the Suffragettes has lifted the Women's franchise Bill out of the category of amusing and frivolous debate into that of a serious political question.