To a man the politicians were surprised. "Who would have dreamt," they said, "that women could be so selfish?" Though their candidate, Mr. Robert Smillie, had not been attacked, the Labour men were also discontented, for there were Labour women in the Women's Social and Political Union, and they considered that these particular women ought to have been working directly for the Labour Party and not to have been subordinating its interests to the getting of votes for themselves. The Conservatives meanwhile said very little about the matter, for their candidate had won and having, therefore, no reason to be aggrieved, they contented themselves with declaring that a glorious victory had been won for the cause of Tariff Reform. So much for the politicians. The Party-following Press, with scarcely an exception, had been unanimous from the very first in their hostility to the Women's Social and Political Union and its methods. Now, as before, they either shook their heads at us, expressing sorrow and regret that we should place ourselves in opposition to the "forces of progress," or merely professed amusement that we should be so foolish and conceited as to think that anything that we could say or do would influence elections. Timid and half-hearted friends of the Suffrage movement also condemned the new by-election policy on the ground that it was unwise for women to thus oppose the Government that had the power, if it wished, to give them what they asked. All this, of course, was to be expected, and so was comparatively easy to meet--it is what every true reformer has had to face. But even amongst some of those who had been hitherto the warmest supporters of the Suffragettes and all that they had done, there was much heart-searching and heart-burning because of the independent by-election policy, and it was felt by these that a mistake was being made in thus holding aloof from Men's party organisations and counting as nought the opinions of private Members of Parliament. The W. S. P. U. pointed out to them that a large majority of the private Members in the House of Commons had long been pledged to give their support to Women's Suffrage but that these pledges had been useless. This was due in the first place to the fact that private Members had little power to carry their pledges into effect because practically all the time at the disposal of Parliament was taken up by the Government, and that, as had been done on the 29th of April, a few obstructionists could easily block the question unless the party in power were prepared to find further time for it. Besides this, private members had over and over again shown that they would willingly break the pledges they had made to women at the bidding of their party leaders.