When Christabel spoke she recalled the many thousands of Women's Suffrage meetings that had been held in this country and the work of the pioneers who had begun the agitation more than forty years before. These women had laboured well and devotedly, yet they had not succeeded in gaining for women the Parliamentary vote. She believed the reason for this to be that they had relied too much upon the justice of their cause and not enough upon their strong right arm, for an idea had only life and power in it when it was backed up by deeds. What had been wanted was action and it was for this reason that the militant tactics had achieved so much already and would in the end succeed. The old methods of asking for the vote had proved futile, and not only were they futile, but they were humiliating and unworthy of women. "I say to you," she said, "that any woman here who is content to appeal for the vote instead of demanding and fighting for it is dishonouring herself." The women who came into the militant movement did not fear suffering and sacrifice; they felt, not that they gave up anything for the movement, but that they gained everything by it. "Why," she cried, "the women of this Union are the happiest people in the world. We have the glorious pride of being made an instrument of those great forces that are working towards progress and liberty." That note was struck again and again, and it was upon that note that the whole meeting rested. Loyalty, enthusiasm, courage, belief in a great cause, the joy of fighting for it, these things filled the air. No one could fail to be impressed by them. When Mrs. Pankhurst rose to speak someone stepped forward and pressed into her hand a replica of a medal struck to commemorate the fall of the Paris Bastille in the French Revolution, because she had been born on the anniversary of that day. She was weakened and worn by her imprisonment, but her speech, brief and somewhat hesitating as it was, contained a pronouncement heralding important events, for it foreshadowed the hardest and bitterest struggle to secure the rights of Political Offenders to British women political prisoners that had yet been fought.