has suffered in life or limb; our great movement towards freedom has not been stained by serious crime. Compared with the Irish Nationalist movement in the 'eighties, or the recent unrest in India, the so-called "violence" of the suffragettes is absolutely negligible in degree, except as an indication of their frame of mind. Far more violence has been suffered by the suffragettes than they have caused their opponents to suffer. The violence of the stewards at Liberal meetings in throwing out either men or women who dared to ask questions about women's suffrage has been most discreditable. It may be hoped it has been checked by an action claiming damages brought on at the Leeds Assizes in March 1911 on behalf of a man who had had his leg broken by the violence with which he had been thrown out of a meeting at Bradford by Liberal stewards, in the previous November. The judge ruled that his ejection from the meeting was in itself unlawful, and the only question he left to the jury was to assess damages. The jury awarded the plaintiff £100; this decision was appealed against, but the appeal was withdrawn in October 1911.[39] Mark Twain once wrote of the women suffragists in his own country, "For forty years they have swept an imposingly large number of unfair laws from the statute books of America. In this brief time these serfs have set themselves free--essentially. _Men could not have done as much for themselves in that time without bloodshed_, at least they never have, and that is an argument that they didn't know how."[40] Perhaps the mild degree of violence perpetrated by the suffragettes was intended to lower our sex pride; we were going to show the world how to gain reforms without violence, without killing people and blowing up buildings, and doing the other silly things that men have done when they wanted the laws altered. Lord Acton once wrote: "It seems to be a law of political evolution that no great advance in human freedom can be gained except after the display of some kind of violence." We wanted to show that we could make the grand advance in human freedom, at which we aimed without the display of any kind of violence. We have been disappointed in that ambition, but we may still lay the flattering unction to our souls that the violence offered has not been formidable, and that the fiercest of the suffragettes have been far more ready to suffer pain than to inflict it. What those endured who underwent the hunger strike and the anguish of forcible feeding can hardly be overestimated. Their courage made a very deep impression on the public and touched the imagination of the whole country.