The race for the Derby was held on the last Wednesday of May. The King's horse was the favourite. Crowds even more enormous than usual gathered to witness it; among them a young woman, a militant suffragist, Emily Davidson, of Morpeth, in Northumberland, had managed to place herself close to the winning-post against the rope barrier which kept the crowd off the actual track. As the King's horse swept by at a tremendous speed, Emily Davidson threw herself in front of it. Down came the horse with fearful violence; the jockey was, of course, thrown, and seriously injured; and there lay Emily Davidson, mortally injured. She had deliberately sacrificed her life in order, in this sensational way, to draw the attention of the whole world to the determination of women to share in the heritage of freedom which was the boast of every man in the country. The King enquired for the jockey; the Queen enquired for the injured woman. In a day or two it was announced that she was dead. She never recovered consciousness. She had died for her cause. After one of the military disasters which accompanied the early development of the Risorgimento in Italy, the historian writes that young Italy had, at least, shown that it knew how to die. Emily Davidson had shown that she, too, knew how to die. I happened to be in Vienna at the time, and I shall not easily forget the awed solemnity with which a Viennese with whom I had had some halting conversation in German on the suffrage question came to me and said, "Miss Davidson ist todt." It is said that the urgency of the suffrage problem in Great Britain was one reason which induced the ex-Kaiser and his advisers to consider England a decadent power; if this is true, it is only an example of the way in which he misread every sign of the times and totally misunderstood this country. That a woman was capable of throwing away her life on the chance that it might serve the cause of freedom might have taught him to expect what happened about fourteen months later, when over 5,000,000 young Englishmen voluntarily joined the army in order to preserve the principles of liberty and self-government throughout the world. CHAPTER VI THE TURN OF THE TIDE "Yet die not: do thou Wear rather in thy bonds a cheerful brow. Live and take comfort.... Thou hast great allies."