Thus ended our parliamentary struggle, which had lasted since John Stuart Mill moved a women's suffrage amendment to the Reform Bill of 1867. The real source of our victory lay in the enormous majorities by which the suffrage clauses had been carried in the House of Commons, and to the fact that every political party into which that House was divided showed a majority for the principle of women's suffrage. People used to talk about our fifty years' struggle as fifty years in the wilderness, and offer their sympathy upon the length of time we had had to work for our cause. But there was no call for commiseration. We had had a joyful and happy time, marked by victory in some phase or other of our movement all along. We had won municipal suffrage and all local government suffrages. Municipal offices had been opened. Women had been elected to be mayors in important boroughs. The education of girls had been enormously improved; the Universities had been opened; the medical profession had admitted women to its ranks; nearly all the learned societies had followed suit. Women were no longer treated either socially or legally as if they were helpless children—"milk-white lambs, bleating for man's protection," as one of our poets had called them; a fair share of the responsibilities of capable citizenship was within their reach. To those who were heard to groan from time to time over the fifty years it took us to win household suffrage for women we could justly reply that the time we had taken to win household suffrage for women had been just two years less than the time men had taken to cover the same ground. For, taking 1832 as their starting-point with the Reform Bill of that year, it had occupied them fifty-two years before they won household suffrage for themselves, and they started with the advantage of about one million of voters already in existence, and with the further and much greater advantage of the tradition of seven hundred years of freedom and self-government. We had no such advantages; we had not one vote between us; "we could not get the vote because we had not got the franchise," as _Punch_ put it, and in lieu of the tradition of centuries of freedom behind us, we had the exactly opposite tradition of unbroken subjection and subordination. The best men and women in each succeeding generation helped and encouraged our movement from the days of Mary Wollstonecraft onwards. We were winning all the time, and never had any cause for despondency. Our movement goes on all the more surely and rapidly now that we have what all men have found essential to freedom, the power to control the Government and by our vote help to decide by what type of men the country shall be governed.