The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [333]
She had great faith in her own feminine authority and intuition. In late 1910 she made an appeal to Lloyd George during the election campaign. It was a silly letter, sublimely unaware of its own silliness.
I am sure you are as generous as you are impulsive. I am going to make a political appeal to you. I say political against personal for, if you do not respond to my appeal, I shall be very unhappy, but not affronted. Don’t when you speak on platforms arouse what is low and sordid and violent in your audience; it hurts those members of it that are fighting these elections with the noblest desire to see fair play; men animated by no desire to punch anyone’s head; men of disinterested emotion able to pity and heal their fellow men, whether it be a lord or a sweep. I expect the cool-blooded class hatred shown for some years in the corporate councils of the House of Lords has driven you into saying that lords are high like cheese etc. etc. etc.
If your speeches only hurt and alienated lords, it would not perhaps so much matter—but they hurt and offend not only the King and men of high estate, but quite poor men, Liberals of all sorts—they lose us votes …
Lloyd George replied with steel irony
… I have undertaken in spite of a racking cold to address a dozen meetings before the election is over. If you would only convey to the Whips your emphatic belief that my speeches are doing harm to the cause you will render the party a service and incidentally confer on me a great favour…
In November 1911 Lloyd George mischievously announced that he had torpedoed the Conciliation Bill, which would have given the Vote to a limited number of women. Instead there was to be a Bill on Manhood Suffrage Reform. The women, both the militant suffragettes and the calm and reasonable suffragists, were appalled.
In February Emmeline Pankhurst stated: “The argument of the broken pane of glass is the most valuable argument in politics.” Women had discomfited the daily life of the nation, as it had been, with increasing wit and venom. “Votes for Women” was burned into the greens of golf courses and written in scarlet greasepaint on the Prime Minister’s blotting pad. Respectable black-garbed ladies, under respectable black hats, produced from comfortable, large, respectable handbags claw hammers and large stones, and walked steadily down the great shopping streets of cities, rhythmically crashing down the plate-glass windows. Miss Christabel Pankhurst, in various disguises, pink straw hat, blue sunglasses, evaded the one hundred hunting detectives to the tune of the “d___d elusive Christabel.” She finally slid away to Paris, from
where she directed the increasingly extravagant acts of outrage, and took her small, pretty dog for walks in the Park. Her mother was, as she frequently was, suffering in prison.
In March Mr. Asquith, the silver-tongued, spoke in the House about the coal-miners’ strike which was paralysing the country. He appealed to the miners and to the members of Parliament. He broke down in tears.
In March, also, Margot Asquith decided to intervene secretly. She wrote to a labour leader who had been invited to luncheon, and proposed a secret meeting. It was a very feminine plea.
The big question I long to ask a man of your ability, sympathy and possibly very painful experience is: What do you want?
I don’t, of course, mean for yourself, as I am certain you are as straight as I am, and disinterested. It would be on far higher grounds than this that I would ask it.
Do you want everyone to be equal in their material prosperity? Do you think quality of brain could be made equal if we had equal prosperity?
Do you think in trying or even succeeding in making Human Nature equal in their bank books, they would also be equal in the sight of God and Man?
I am a socialist, possibly not on the same lines as you… People who get what they want at the cost of huge suffering to others I would like to understand more perfectly.
Just now I suspend