As far as argument was concerned our battle was won. The antisuffragists, when they pulled themselves together sufficiently to have a great meeting, continually fell back, even in the case of their more distinguished speakers, on the undeniable statement that men were men, and women were women. Another speaker at the Albert Hall antisuffrage meeting gravely reproached the suffragists for wilfully misleading industrial women by persuading them that women's wages would be favourably affected by the possession of political power. His words were: "It is a heartless and cruel deception to tell poor women that the possession of a vote would enable them to raise their wages. Parliament has never attempted such a thing for men." This was on February 28th, 1912. Within less than a month the Government, of which he remained a member, did regulate the minimum rate of wages for men and boys in coal-mines. We believed that the triumph of the miners was in part due to their electoral power. The antisuffragists were greatly elated by the success of their Albert Hall meeting, and their monthly organ, _The Antisuffrage Review_, for March triumphantly exclaimed: "The great demonstration has been held, and the woman's suffrage bubble has been pricked." Mrs. Humphry Ward, however, took a different and a more subdued line. Speaking at Oxford a little later, she said that "the real fight was only beginning, and would probably last a long time." As pricked bubbles are not of a very durable character, she thus virtually disowned the exuberant metaphor of her paper. But the small fry in the antisuffrage movement were about this time more than usually offensive and inept. One of them, a woman writer with a tolerably well-known name, published the following: "For social purposes, now and always, man is superior to woman. Organized society rests on him. It would go on quite comfortably if every woman retired to her own particular wigwam and did nothing but breed." Another writer, probably male, not to be left behind in offensive rubbish, wrote in the _Liverpool Courier_: "Votes for women! Why, the matter is in a nutshell. If married, she exercises the franchise through her husband. If a widow, she is a past-partner in a joint concern, and should rest content with the achievement of other days. If single, she is, or ought to be, too busily engaged in trying to capture 'John Henry Charles' to think about votes." Degrading and vulgar nonsense of this kind was nauseating to every decent-minded man or woman, whether for or against suffrage; but it made many who had previously been indifferent turn with sympathy to those who were claiming political freedom for women and trying to preach and live the gospel of a nobler and truer relationship between the sexes. "Self-reverent each and reverencing each, Distinct in individualities, But like each other ev'n as those who love." These coarse and foolish attacks upon our whole movement did it not one ounce of harm.