THE

HE militant women, so called, have sprung up in England as nowhere else in the world. But whoever holds the English militants to be a spontaneous variation from the normal does not know human history or his age. To disassociate the militant women from the women of the rest of the world is not possible. They are only a highly significant part of the general unrest that is burrowing beneath old codes, undermining old values and ideals, and tossing them up into unsteady mountains of broken sepulchers and moldy rubbish. The middle of the last century saw the stupendous upheaval, with "The Origin of Species" and "The Descent of Man" marking the epochal divide. Since then, more swiftly than mankind has known before, through all its ranks and its two genders there has been mental dynamite in the making. Because it has vision where the other has archaism, the "lower class" is become the higher class, self-conscious and self-poised. Not only youth, but childhood, is a rebel. Art has become anarchic. And as mysteriously as Nature works everywhere, so has she worked with the servant half of the human race, stirring it to self-consciousness and action; helping to keep alive the tiny torch of revolt, all but choked in the deathly damp of tradition and dependence as the silent rebels in the home have passed it on through weary generations to their daughters. For uncounted years the great forces of life have been working silently, and when suddenly the fighting women appear, we are astounded, who count it

no miracle that the wind and the rain pass in the night over naked fields, and in the morning leave them green.

Militancy is not yet a cause; it is an effect. Militancy is not a disease; it is a symptom. If its opponents could stamp it out-and they cannot-they would be doing a foolish and a futile thing. The world's attitude toward the English militants is medieval, and more hysterical than the thing itself at an impossibly undisciplined worst could ever be; because militancy is based on the logic of causes, as fear of it is not. As well stone a thermometer to fragments for registering 105 degrees as to attack militancy in itself as complete or bad.

"But," cry the traditionists, "this may mean sex-war."

It is sex-war; who doubts it? Who doubts there is sex-war, just as there is class-war, and will be until there is worldwide readjustment of human relationships?

"But," cry the traditionists again, “we see women advocating violence, destroying property, breaking laws. There may be bloodshed."

VIOLENCE AND "FAIR PLAY"

WE are seeing violence, indeed, and those of us who have watched this movement do not doubt that blood will flow, if the English Government does not yield in time. Blood has flowed in England before the great charters of human liberties were wrenched from the blind, stupid, heavy thing that men conceive to be gov

ernment; and the English Government cannot escape the charge of having dared the rebel women to use the weapons of men in their demonstrations of hostility to a power that has refused to receive their deputations of women, sent peaceably to seek the righting of their political grievances. The militants took up the glove and hurled the time-honored stones and hammers against the time-honored windows; and, later, when a cabinet minister referred publicly to the burning of Nottingham Castle by rioting men, and said, "Women have not done what men did; they have not burned a castle to the ground, and I see no reason for giving them the vote," his words were the prelude to the continued burning of unoccupied castles throughout England. "But we see women destroying property, breaking laws-" But endure for a moment the novel mental sensation of seeing these militant women as human beings, nothing less nor more, struggling for their half of the great charter of human rights that the early English Chartists, who were men, forgot to win for them.

The early Chartists did establish this, however, and the English Government in its later struggles against men militants has had to remember it-that a political offender is one who breaks a law as a protest against a political grievance, not, as a criminal offender, for personal gain. It remembered it for men agitators when it was sentencing women rioters to prison as criminal offenders, and it was in protest against this discrimination that the Holloway militants began the hunger-strikes in England.

"Ah, yes, the hunger-strikes," say the traditionists. "That is not fair play, depending on their sex-weakness and man's chivalry to embarrass the government. That is the way women fight."

It happens also to be the way revolutionists fight. In Russia, where the golodófka, or hunger-strike, originated, it is the ultimate protest of political prisoners against prison cruelty, and has been used for years by Russian revolutionists, men and women. In "Siberia and the Exile System," published over twenty years ago, George Kennan writes at length of these strikes in Russian prisons, and, on one page, to make his story of Hope Sigida's fate stronger, he puts a curious, hypotheti

cal case of "a cultured, generous, impulsive, and patriotic young Irish girl," working for home rule, subjected to brutal prison regulations, hunger-striking, forcibly fed, and the like, undoubtedly without prescience that in less than a score of years Englishwomen would be taking their leaves from the revolutionists' handbook.

Unthinking people have sneered at the British Government for going into a panic over the hunger-strikers. These people should know that the Russian Government, likewise, is helpless before its prisoners who freely elect to starve. On first thought it would seem that the state, having supplied its prisoners with food, had done its part, and could stand aside unmoved; but it does not, it cannot, though the reasons for its concern are obscure, and difficult to trace. This seems clear, however; that in the end nothing counts against the individual, neither governments nor tortures nor death; and when spirit spurns material preservation of life in the final desperate attempt to obtain that which means more than life, the rare struggle and fine disdain compel involuntary sympathy and admiration. Even the state seems forced into the Aristotelian attitude toward tragedy, and acts accordingly. What really embarrassed the English Government was its own classification of these law-breaking Englishwomen as criminals, and in addition to that blunder, it attempted to feed forcibly intelligent women who chose not to eat.

"And, in any case," the traditionists conclude, "these women are hopeless hysterics, 'touched,' if not actively insane, and ought to be shut up in asylums."