"I for one, friends," Mrs. Pankhurst cried, and we knew that she was thinking of the women she had seen in prison, "I for one, looking round on the sweated and decrepit members of my sex, say that men have had control of these things long enough and that no woman with any spark of womanliness in her will consent to allow this state of things to go on any longer. We are tired of it, we want to be of use and to have the power to make the world a better place both for men and women than it is to-day." She paused then and went on to express quietly but with deep feeling her joy in this great woman's movement that a few years before she had thought she would never live to see. The old cry had been, "You will never rouse women," but she said, "we have done what they thought, and what they hoped, to be impossible; we women are roused." At those words they stopped her with their cheers. Then Annie Kenney rose to tell the story of her first and only other visit to the Royal Albert Hall, when she had gone there to ask of the newly elected and triumphant Liberal Ministry, a pledge for the enfranchisement of her sex. That night, two years before, she had been received with cries of abuse and howled down by an audience of angry men. "There seemed to be thousands against one," she said, "but I did not mind because I knew that our action that night was like summer rain on a drooping flower; it would give new life to the woman's movement." And now Mrs. Pethick Lawrence, our Treasurer, was to come forward to give yet one more proof that Annie Kenney's words were true. When the treasurer had imagined that Mrs. Pankhurst's chair was to be an empty one, she had planned that those present should place in it an offering of money for the cause, but now she would be able to place that offering in the founder's hands. Towards the sum that was collected there was already the £2,382 11s. 7d, which had been raised by the devotion and sacrifice of members of the Union during the week of self denial; a promise of £1,000 a year till women were enfranchised, from a lady who wished to remain anonymous, and a second £1,000 which Mrs. Lawrence herself, in conjunction with her husband, wished to give. And now it was for the audience to do their part. Whilst the treasurer had been speaking, Mr. Lawrence had been arranging a scoring apparatus. Then, one by one, twelve women rose up in the hall and each promised to give £100. Their example was followed by numbers of others. At the same time, promise cards, filled up by members of the audience, were constantly being handed to the platform, where Mrs. Lawrence read them out. At last the sum of £7,000 had been set up, and, with a stirring call from Christabel to work at the by-elections at Peckham and Hastings in which the Union was then engaging, the meeting closed.