Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [245]
Put off again and again by Asquith’s promises to carry through Enfranchisement, which he made to secure quiet and never kept, the feminists in the years after 1909 slashed pictures in the National Gallery and set fires in cricket pavilions, race-course grandstands, resort hotels and even churches. They interrupted services in St. Paul’s and Westminster, forced petitions on the King at court, engaged in “painful and distressing” struggles with police, forcing their own arrest and imprisonment. They endured starvation and pain with mad fortitude, invited humiliation, brutality and finally, when Emily Davidson threw herself under the hoofs of the horses in the Derby of 1913, even death. Although these extremes were not reached until the period 1910–14, the practice and the spirit were already strong by 1909.
Men, otherwise decent citizens, reacted in the ugly spirit of a Saturday night drunkard beating his wife. When a meeting addressed by Lloyd George in the Albert Hall in December, 1908, was broken up by militants who, shouting “Deeds not words!” tore off their coats to reveal themselves dressed in prisoner’s gowns, the stewards, according to the Manchester Guardian, “went mad with fury and rushed upon the women, ejecting them with nauseating brutality, knocking them against seats, throwing them down steps, dragging them out by the hair.” In other instances of the kind they were deliberately struck in the breast. Possibly the fury was provoked by woman’s abandonment of feminine lures and her substitution of attack as a means of gaining her desires, which seemed to unsex her. It touched fundamentals. “These termagants, these unsexed viragoes, these bipeds!” thundered a Nonconformist minister, expressing more than all the editorials. The strange physical fury generated by the women’s struggle for the vote was the most unsettling phenomenon of the Liberal era.
By 1909 a gathering pessimism converged upon the Liberals and those allied with them. “A thousand sad and baffling riddles” had somehow replaced the simple verities of politics, wrote Masterman, now a member of the Government as Under-Secretary of the Home Office. In 1909 he published The Condition of England, a book of profound discouragement. He saw the world divided vertically “between nation and nation armed to the teeth” and horizontally between rich and poor. “The future of progress is still doubtful and precarious. Humanity at best appears as a shipwrecked crew which has taken refuge on a narrow ledge of rock beaten by wind and wave; we cannot tell how many, if any at all, will survive when the long night gives place to morning.”
Around him Masterman saw a complacent society reposing in an illusion of security but “of all the illusions of the opening of the Twentieth Century perhaps the most remarkable is that of security.” Instead of security he saw “gigantic and novel forces of mechanical invention, upheavals of people, social discontents … vast implements of destruction placed in the hands of a civilization imperfectly self-controlled” in which “material advance has transcended moral progress.”
James Bryce, another member of the Liberal Government as Chief Secretary for Ireland and since 1907 as Ambassador to Washington, found discouragement in the central theme of his life, the democratic process. In a