This, then, was the position of the suffrage question between the close of the summer session and the beginning of November 1911. All the suffrage societies were working in complete harmony on the same lines and for the same Bill. The militant societies had suspended militant tactics, and also their anti-government election policy. The Women's Liberal Federation, whose co-operation was of great and obvious importance, were uniting their efforts with those of the suffrage societies, when on November 7, a bombshell was dropped among them in the speech of the Prime Minister, replying to a deputation from the People's Suffrage Federation, who presented a memorial asking for adult suffrage. Mr. Asquith then announced that it was the intention of his Government to introduce during the coming session (1912) the Electoral Reform Bill, which he had foreshadowed in 1908, that all existing franchises would be swept away, plural voting abolished, and the period of residence reduced. The new franchise was to be based on citizenship, and votes were to be given "to citizens of full age and competent understanding." But no place was found within the four comers of the Bill for the enfranchisement of women. Mr. Asquith reiterated his promise of facilities for the Conciliation Bill, and then merely dismissed the subject of women's suffrage with the remark that his opinions upon it were well known. If it had been his object to enrage every women's suffragist to the point of frenzy, he could not have acted with greater perspicacity. Years of unexampled effort and self-sacrifice had been expended by women to force upon the Government the enfranchisement of women, and when the Prime Minister spoke the only promise he made was to give more votes to men. Mrs. Bernard Shaw exactly expressed the sentiments of women's suffragists, whether militant or non-militant, when she wrote that Mr. Asquith's speech filled her with "an impulse of blind rage"; she felt she had been personally insulted, and that he had said to her in effect "that the vilest male wretch who can contrive to keep a house of ill-fame shall have a vote, and that the noblest woman in England shall not have one because she is a female" (_The Times_, November 21, 1911).