This sort of thing did not continue long in Chelmsford, for, as has invariably been the case, as soon as the Suffragettes became known to the people, the hostility which was at first manifested towards them entirely disappeared. Mrs. Drummond was the heroine of this election, for the W. S. P. U. campaign was entirely organised by her. In the illustration she is shown distributing leaflets to the farmers in the Chelmsford Market Place at the close of her speech to them. The result of the poll was a fall of nearly twenty per cent. in the Liberal vote, and a piling-up of one hostile majority against them from 454 to 2,565, which was generally acknowledged in the constituency to be largely due to the Suffragettes. The violence of the rowdies met with little rebuke from political leader writers and under the heading, "Sparrows for Suffragettes," the _Westminster Gazette_ stated, "Essex has just provided two amusing Suffragist Incidents," and described in the same spirit the letting loose of a flight of sparrows inside a hall where the women were speaking and the breaking up of a Suffragist meeting by boys who had rushed the speakers, and cast carbide on the wet roads. Consider the action of a body of women who, in order to obtain a share in the constitution, deliberately decide to attend the meetings addressed by the members of a Government that has the power to grant them what they desire but withholds it. Consider also that these women are deprived by their sex of the principal constitutional means of pressing their claim and that their action is taken at great personal risk. Then contrast the action of these women with that of a crowd of men who, absolutely careless of injuring either persons or property, and merely because they imagine that their victims are unpopular or opposed to those whom they believe to be their own political friends, deliberately set out with the intention of breaking up the meetings of women who are withholding no man's rights from him and who have no power to give rights to anyone, but who are merely struggling to obtain the franchise which their assailants themselves possess. Surely no one with an unprejudiced mind could consider that there is a parallel between the case of those particular women and those particular men. Party politicians had before them frequent examples of the two cases and they decided that there was no parallel. They decided that the action of the men was excusable, but that the action of the women must be condemned in the most emphatic terms and must be sternly repressed at any cost. [Illustration: The human letters dispatched by Miss Jessie Kenney to Mr. Asquith at No. 10 Downing Street, Jan. 23, 1909]