Though the Magistrate rebuked the women for the methods they had adopted, we felt that he was impressed by their demeanour and that he was loth to sentence them. He ordered that they should go to prison for two months in the third division without the option of a fine. The sentence was heavy enough, but lighter than we had feared in view of the fact that many of the other women were to remain in prison for three months. [Illustration: Christabel Pankhurst inviting the public to "rush" the House of Commons at a meeting in Trafalgar Square, Sunday, October 11th, 1908] When the House of Commons met on the same afternoon, several members of every party in the House asked, as they had done on previous occasions, that the women should be treated as political offenders. As before, however, Mr. Gladstone sheltered himself behind the statement, which nobody believed, that the Magistrate was alone responsible for placing the women in the second and third divisions and that he himself had no power to interfere. On the morning after the "raid" the newspapers had mostly contented themselves with rebuking the women for what they had done, but in a few days there came a reaction of feeling which was accelerated both by the harshness of the sentences imposed and by Mr. Gladstone's refusal to mitigate the rigours of the prison treatment. The country was now overwhelmed by one of those terribly oppressive heat waves which come upon us suddenly from time to time and are borne with such difficulty in our usually temperate climate, and there gradually leaked out from Holloway accounts of the Suffragist women fainting in the exercise yards[28] and being seized with illness in their cells. There happened to be some cases of measles in the prison hospital, and Miss Elsie Howey, having contracted the disease there, was exceedingly ill for many weeks. All these things combined to focus public attention upon the harsh treatment of the Suffragette prisoners. On July 10th the _Manchester Guardian_ in a leading Article said: It demands considerable obtuseness to believe, as some persons apparently do, that close confinement in the heat of Summer or the cold of Winter within a solitary and unwholesome cell, deprival of exercise for twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four, subjection to menial authority, ignorance of the welfare of one's friends, the performing of dull and alien tasks, deprivation of writing materials, partial suffocation and the wearing of ugly, ill-fitting clothing that has already been worn by the vilest criminals, are for delicate and sensitive women the elements of a comedy. They compose a great and terrible torture.... Because they are suffering for an idea their stringent imprisonment is indefensible. It violates the public conscience and the law and the courts cannot wage war on the public conscience without forfeiting respect and authority.