To T. H. W.
“BANFF,
”June 4, 1908.
‘Since we left Vancouver we have had a delicious time, but yesterday was the cream! We started at 8.30 from the very nice Field Hotel, on a special train, just our car and an engine, and—the car being in front—were pushed up the famous Kicking Horse Pass, on a glorious morning. The Superintendent in charge of the Laggan division of the line came up with us and explained the construction of the new section of the line, which is to take the place of the present dangerous and costly track down the pass. At present there are no tunnels, nothing but a long hill, up and down which extraordinary precautions have to be taken. Now they are to have spiral tunnels, or rather one long one, on the St. Gotthard plan. One won’t see so much, but it will be safer, and far less expensive to work.
“The beauty of the snow peaks, the lateral valleys, the leaping streams, the forests!—and the friendliness of everybody adds to the charm. At Laggan we left the car and drove up—three miles—to Lake Louise—a perfectly beautiful place, which I tried to sketch—alack! It is, I think, more wonderful than any place of the kind in Switzerland, because of the colour of the rocks, which hold the gorgeous glacier and snow-peak. We spent the day there, looked after by a charming Scotchwoman—Miss Mollison—one of three sisters who run the C.P.R. hotels about here. About 6.30 we drove down again to find Snell and George delighted to welcome us back to the car. Then we came on to Banff, sitting on the platform of the car, and looking back at a beautiful sunset among the mountains. We shall part from the Rockies with a pang! Emerald Lake and Lake Louise would certainly conjure one back again, if they were any less than 6,000 miles from home! As it is, I suppose one’s physical eyes will never see them again, but it is something to have beheld them once.”
At Field Mrs. Ward had met the eminent explorer, Mrs. Schäffer, who was busy collecting guides and ponies for another expedition into the unknown tracts of the Rockies. She and Mrs. Ward made great friends, and some months later the latter was delighted to receive from her photographs of a wonderful lake which she had discovered, and to which she gave the name of Lake Maligne. Mrs. Ward could not resist weaving the virgin lake into the last chapter of her story, Canadian Born.
When at length the long journey was over and the faithful car landed her safely at Montreal, Mrs. Ward still had one pleasant duty to perform—the handing over of her earnings at Vancouver to Lord Grey, as a thank-offering for all the good things that had fallen to her lot since she had parted from him three weeks before. His reply delighted her, especially since she had just ended her Canadian experiences by an expedition up the Heights of Abraham, escorted by Col. Wood, the Canadian military historian.
June 12, 1908.
MY DEAR MRS. WARD,—
You are most kind! I have received no contribution to the Quebec Battlefields that has given me greater pleasure. I value it partly because it is yours and partly Vancouver’s. Every cent that filters through from B.C. and the Prairie Provinces is a joy to me. The Canadian National Problem, the Imperial Problem, is how to link B.C. and the Western Provinces more closely with the Maritime Eastern Provinces—how to improve the transportation service, East and West, and cause the great highroad of human traffic from Europe to Asia to go via Montreal and Vancouver—that is the problem, and that is why I rejoice over every Western Piccanin who subscribes his few cents to Quebec. A feeling for Quebec will remain engraven on his heart for all time.
...I do not think the character of the debt owing in £ s. d. by the British race to the Wolfe family has ever been put before the public. Wolfe’s father never could obtain the repayment from the British Government of £16,000 advanced by him during the Marlborough campaigns. The different Departments did the pass trick with him—the first rule of departmental administration—played battledore and shuttlecock with him until he desisted from pressing his claim for fear of being considered a Dun!
Then James Wolfe, our Quebec hero, never received the C. in C. allowance of £10 per day. His mother claimed £3,000 from the British Treasury as the amount owing to her son on September 13, 1759—but the poor hard-up departments played battledore and shuttlecock with her, and she, like her Wolfe relations, was too great a gentleman to press for payment. When, however, she found that James had left £10,000 to be distributed according to the instructions of his will, and that his assets only realized £8,000, the dear good lady did try and squeeze £2,000 out of the £19,000 owing by the Government to the family, in order that she might carry out her boy’s wishes—but it was a hopeless, useless effort, and the splendid dame heaped all the coals of fire she could on the heads of the stony-hearted, perhaps because stony-broke, British People, by leaving the whole of her fortune to the widows and orphans of the officers who fell under Wolfe’s command at Quebec. Now I maintain that the whole Empire has a moral responsibility in this matter, for have not the most energetic of the descendants of the British People of 1759 emigrated into Greater Britain? The story of how we recompensed Wolfe for giving us an immortal example and half a continent has not, so far as I know, been told.
Delighted to think you are going back to England a red-hot Canadian missionary. Send out all the young people whom you know and believe in, and who are receptive and sympathetic and appreciative, and have sufficient imagination not to be stupidly critical. Send them all over here. We shall be delighted to see them, although I fear they cannot all get Private Cars!
If Mrs. Ward did not, on her return to England, set up altogether as an amateur emigration agent, she yet paid her debt to Canada by the delightful enthusiasm for the young country with all its boundless possibilities, combined with a shrewd appreciation of its difficulties, which she threw into her novel, Canadian Born. Neither Canada nor Lord Grey had any reason to complain of the devotion, both of heart and of head, which she gave to the cause. To her American friends, on the other hand, her impassioned attack in Daphne, or Marriage à la Mode, on the divorce laws of the United States, came as something of a surprise, for they had not realized, while she was with them, how deep an impression these things had made on her, or how much her artistic imagination had been captured by their tragic or sordid possibilities. Daphne is, indeed, little but a powerful tract, written under great stress of feeling, but the Americans missed in it the happy touch that had created Lucy Foster, and regretted that Mrs. Ward should have felt bound to portray for their benefit so wholly disagreeable a young person as Daphne Floyd. Time has, however, brought its revenges in the strong movement that has now arisen in the United States for the unification of the widely-differing divorce laws of the various States under one Federal Law.
Yet there were deeper forces at work in the writing of Daphne than any which Mrs. Ward’s brief visit to America alone could have accounted for. The growing disturbance which the Suffrage question was making in the currents of English life had thrown Mrs. Ward’s thoughts into these channels for longer than her critics knew. Daphne was one result of this fermentation; another was what we should now call “direct action.” Within a month after her return from America Mrs. Ward wrote to Miss Arnold of Fox How (herself an undaunted Suffragist at the age of seventy-five): “You will see from the papers what it is that has been taking all my time—the foundation of an Anti-Suffrage League.”
MRS. WARD, as is well known, did not believe in Women’s Suffrage. She had heard the subject discussed from her earliest days at Oxford, ever since the time when the first Women’s Petition for the vote was brought to the House of Commons by Miss Garrett and Miss Emily Davies in 1866, and John Stuart Mill moved his amendment to the Reform Bill of 1867. But it did not greatly interest her. Her mind was set in other directions, responding to the intellectual stimulus of Oxford rather in the field of historical and religious inquiry and leading her on, as we have seen, to her memorable “revolt from awe” in the matter of the Interpretation of the Scriptures. Her group of friends at Oxford were hardly touched by the Suffrage agitation; the movement for the Higher Education of Women, in which Mrs. Ward bore so distinguished a part, was wholly unconnected with it. Indeed it was the very success of this movement that helped to convince Mrs. Ward that the right lines for women’s advance lay, not in the political agitation for the Suffrage, but in the broadening of education, so as to fit her sex for the many tasks which were opening out before it. But she had also an inborn dislike and distaste for the type of agitation which, even in those early days, the Suffragists carried on; for the “anti-Man” feeling that ran through it, and for the type of woman—the “New Woman” as she was called in the eighties—who gravitated towards its ranks. Her scholarly mind rejected many of the Suffragist arguments as shallow and unproven, especially those which concerned the economic condition of women, while the practical co-operation between men and women that she saw all round her, both in Oxford and afterwards in London, gave her the conviction that the remaining disabilities of women might and would be removed in due course by this road, rather than by a political turmoil which would only serve to embitter the relations between them. In her eyes women were neither better nor worse than men, but different; so different that neither they nor the State would really be served by this attempt to press them into a political machine which owed its development solely to the male sex. In later years she had many close friends in the Suffrage camp, nor did she ever lose those of her earlier days who were converted, but to the end there remained a profound antipathy between her and the “feminist” type of mind, with its crudities and extravagances—the type that was to manifest itself so disastrously in later years among the “Suffragettes.” It was not that she wished her sex to remain aloof from the toil and dust of the world, as her Positivist friends would have liked; rather she felt it to be the duty of all educated women to work themselves to the bone for the uplifting of women and children less fortunate than themselves, and so to repay their debt to the community; but clamour for their own “rights” was a different thing: ugly in itself, and likely to lead, in her opinion, to a sex-war of very dubious outcome.
The first time that Mrs. Ward was drawn into the battle of the Suffrage was on the occasion, early in 1889, of Lord Salisbury’s much-trumpeted conversion to it, when a Private Member’s Bill[30] of the usual limited type was before Parliament, and the Prime Minister’s attitude appeared to make it probable that the Bill might pass. Mrs. Creighton—then also opposed to the Suffrage, though on somewhat different grounds from Mrs. Ward’s—Mr. Frederic Harrison, Mr. Knowles, and Mrs. Ward united in organizing a movement of protest. It was decided at a meeting held at Mr. Harrison’s house in May that the signatures of women eminent in the world of education, literature and public service should be invited to a “Protest against the extension of the Parliamentary Franchise to Women,” which Mrs. Ward had drawn up (with some assistance from Mrs. Creighton), and which Mr. Knowles undertook to publish in the next month’s Nineteenth Century.
The arguments advanced in this Protest are interesting as showing the position from which Mrs. Ward hardly moved in the next thirty years, though many of her original allies who signed it fell away and joined the Suffrage camp. There is first the emphasis on the essentially different functions of men and women:
“While desiring the fullest possible development of the powers, energies and education of women, we believe that their work for the State, and their responsibilities towards it, must always differ essentially from those of men, and that therefore their share in the working of the State machinery should be different from that assigned to men.” Women can never share in such labours as “the working of the Army and Navy, all the heavy, laborious, fundamental industries of the State, such as those of mines, metals and railways, the management of commerce and finance, the service of that merchant fleet on which our food supply depends.... Therefore it is not just to give to women direct power of deciding questions of Parliamentary policy, of war, of foreign or colonial affairs, of commerce and finance equal to that possessed by men. We hold that they already possess an influence on political matters fully proportioned to the possible share of women in the political activities of England.”
At the same time the recent extensions of women’s responsibilities, such as their admission to the municipal vote and to membership of School Boards, Boards of Guardians, etc., is warmly welcomed, “since here it is possible for them not only to decide but to help in carrying out, and judgment is therefore weighted by a true responsibility.” Then comes a denial of any widespread demand among women themselves for the franchise, “as is always the case if a grievance is real and reform necessary,” and finally an argument on which Mrs. Ward continued to lay much stress in after years, that of the steady removal of the reasonable grievances of women by the existing machinery of a male Parliament.
‘It is often urged that certain injustices of the law towards women would be easily and quickly remedied were the political power of the vote conceded to them; and that there are many wants, especially among working women, which are now neglected, but which the suffrage would enable them to press on public attention. We reply that during the past half-century all the principal injustices of the law towards women have been amended by means of the existing constitutional machinery; and with regard to those that remain, we see no signs of any unwillingness on the part of Parliament to deal with them. On the contrary, we remark a growing sensitiveness to the claims of women, and the rise of a new spirit of justice and sympathy among men, answering to those advances made by women in education, and the best kind of social influence, which we have already noticed and welcomed. With regard to the business or trade interests of women—here, again, we think it safer and wiser to trust to organization and self-help on their own part, and to the growth of a better public opinion among the men workers, than to the exercise of a political right which may easily bring women into direct and hasty conflict with men.”
This feeling was evidently uppermost in her thoughts at that time, for she wrote as early as January, 1889, to her sister-in-law, Miss Agnes Ward:
‘What are these tremendous grievances women are still labouring under, and for which the present Parliament is not likely to give them redress? I believe in them as little as I believe now in the grievances of the Irish tenant. There were grievances, but by the action of the parties concerned and their friends under the existing system they have been practically removed. No doubt much might be done to improve the condition of certain classes of women, just as much might be done for that of certain classes of men, but the world is indefinitely improveable, and I believe there is little more chance of quickening the pace—wisely—with women’s suffrage than without it.... There is a great deal of championing of women’s suffrage going on which is not really serious. Mr. Haldane, a Gladstonian member, said to me the other day, ‘Oh, I shall vote for it of course!—with this amendment, that it be extended to married women, and in the intention of leading through it to manhood suffrage.’ But if many people treat it from this point of view and avow it, the struggle is likely to be a good deal hotter and tougher before we have done with it than it has ever been yet.
“I should like to know John Morley’s mind on the matter. He began as an enthusiast and has now decided strongly against. So have several other people whose opinion means a good deal to me. And as to women, whether their lives have been hard or soft, I imagine that when the danger really comes, we shall be able to raise a protest which will be a surprise to the other side.”
In spite of the fact that the organizers of the Protest were handicapped by the natural reluctance of many of their warmest supporters to take part in what seemed to them a “political agitation,” and so to let their names appear in print,[31] they worked to such purpose during the ten days that elapsed between the meeting at Mr. Frederic Harrison’s house and the going to press of the Nineteenth Century that 104 signatures were secured. They were regarded by their contemporaries as the signatures either of “eminent women” or of “superior persons,” according to the bias of those who contemplated the list. Posterity may be interested to know that they included such future supporters of the Suffrage as Miss Beatrice Potter (Mrs. Sidney Webb), Mrs. Creighton and Mrs. T. H. Green, while among women distinguished either through their own work or their husbands’ in many fields occur the names of Mrs. Goschen, Lady Stanley of Alderley, Lady Frederick Cavendish, Mrs. T. H. Huxley, Mrs. J. R. Green, Mrs. Max Müller, Mrs. W. E. Forster, and Mrs. Arnold Toynbee.
Naturally the Protest drew the Suffrage forces into the field. The July number of the Nineteenth Century contained two “Replies,” from Mrs. Fawcett and Mrs. Ashton Dilke, to which Mrs. Creighton in her turn supplied a “Rejoinder.” Meanwhile a form of signature to the Protest had been circulated with the Review, and was supplied in large numbers on demand, so that in the August number Mr. Knowles was enabled to print twenty-seven pages of signatures to the statement that “The enfranchisement of women would be a measure distasteful to the great majority of women of the country—unnecessary—and mischievous both to themselves and to the State.” Mrs. Creighton’s “Rejoinder” was regarded on the Anti-Suffrage side as a dignified and worthy close to the discussion. “The question has been laid to rest,” wrote Mr. Harrison to her, “for this generation, I feel sure.” Nearly thirty years were indeed to pass before the question was “laid to rest,” though in a different sense from Mr. Harrison’s.
During the earlier part of that long period Mrs. Ward concerned herself no further, in any public capacity, with the task of opposing the Suffrage forces. Her own opinions were known and respected by her friends of whatever party, while her growing interest in and knowledge of social questions gave her an ever-increasing right to advocate them. At Grosvenor Place the talk at luncheon or dinner-table would often play round the dread subject in the freest manner, with a frequent appeal, in those happy days, to ridicule as the deciding factor. Mrs. Ward was particularly pleased with a dictum of John Morley’s, “For Heaven’s sake, don’t let us be the first to make ourselves ridiculous in the eyes of Europe!” which I remember hearing her quote from time to time; but on this subject, as on all others, the atmosphere of the house was one of liberty to all comers to air and express their opinions. Most of her own family were of the Suffrage persuasion, especially her two sisters, Julia and Ethel, but her children followed her lead—save one who, being a member of a youthful debating society where the wisdom of nineteen ran riot in speech and counter-speech, was told off one day to get up the arguments in favour of Women’s Suffrage and to open the debate; she got them up with the energy of that terrible age, and remained a convert ever afterwards.
The question, in fact, did not enter the region of practical politics until the advent to power of the Liberal Government in December, 1905. It was on the occasion of Campbell-Bannerman’s great meeting at the Albert Hall, before the election, that the portent of the Suffragette first manifested itself in the form of a young woman who put inconvenient questions to “C.-B.,” in a strident voice, from the orchestra, and was unmercifully hustled out by indignant stewards. It was the beginning of eight years of tribulation. Mrs. Ward watched through 1906 and 1907 the growing violences of these women with mingled horror and satisfaction: horror at the unloveliness of their proceedings and satisfaction at the feeling that an outraged public would never yield to such clamour what they had refused to yield to argument. She did not yet know the uses of democracy. But the constitutional agitation was also making way during these years, especially since it was known that Campbell-Bannerman himself was a Suffragist, and even after his death Mr. Asquith announced to a deputation of Liberal M.P.’s, in May, 1908, that if when the Government’s proposed Reform Bill was introduced, an amendment for the extension of the franchise to women on democratic lines were moved to it, his Government as a Government would not oppose such an amendment. This announcement brought Women’s Suffrage very definitely within the bounds of practical politics, so that those who believed that the change would be disastrous felt bound to exert themselves in rallying the forces of opposition. Mrs. Ward had hardly returned from America before Lord Cromer and other prominent Anti-Suffragists approached her with regard to the starting of a society pledged to oppose the movement. They knew well enough that no such counter-movement had any chance of success without her active support, and they shrewdly augured that, once captured, she would become the life and soul of it. Mrs. Ward groaned but acquiesced, and thus in July of this year (1908) was born the “Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League,” inaugurated at a meeting held at the Westminster Palace Hotel on July 21.
In the long struggle that now opened it is easy to see that Mrs. Ward was not really at her ease in conducting a movement of mere opposition and denial. She did not enjoy it as she enjoyed her battles with the L.C.C. for the pushing forward of her schemes for the children, yet she felt that it was “laid upon her” and that there was no escape. “As Gertrude says, it is all fiendish, but we feel we must do it,” she wrote after the inaugural meeting; but this feeling explains her imperative desire to give a positive side to the movement by dwelling on the great need for women’s work on local bodies—a line of argument which was mistrusted by many of her male supporters, one of whom, Lord James of Hereford, had spoken passionately in the House of Lords against the Act of 1907 for enabling women to sit on County or Borough Councils. But Mrs. Ward had her way, so that when the programme of the Anti-Suffrage League came out it was found to contain twin “Objects”:
(a) To resist the proposal to admit women to the Parliamentary Franchise and to Parliament; and
(b) To maintain the principle of the representation of women on municipal and other bodies concerned with the domestic and social affairs of the community.
This second “Object” was indeed the keystone of Mrs. Ward’s fabric for the useful employment of the energies and gifts of women, in a manner suited to their special experience as well as conducive to the real interests of the State. She called it somewhere the “enlarged housekeeping” of the nation, and maintained that the need for women’s work and influence here was unlimited, whereas in the special Parliamentary fields of foreign affairs, war and finance, women might indeed have opinions, but opinions unsubstantiated by experience and unbacked by the sanction of physical force. It is interesting to observe how she conducts her case for a “forward policy” as regards Local Government before her own supporters in the Anti-Suffrage Review (July, 1910):
‘There is no doubt that the appointment of a Local Government Sub-Committee marks a certain new and definite stage in the programme of our League. By some, perhaps, that stage will be watched with a certain anxiety; while others will see in it the fulfilment—so far as it goes—of delayed hopes, and the promise of new strength. The anxiety is natural. For the task before the League is long and strenuous, and that task in its first and most essential aspect is a task of fight, a task of opposition. We are here primarily to resist the imposition on women of the burden of the parliamentary vote. And it is easily intelligible that those who realize keenly the struggle before us may feel some alarm lest anything should divert the energies of the League from its first object, or lest those who are primarily interested in the fight against the franchise should find themselves expected willy-nilly to throw themselves into work for which they are less fitted, and for which they care less.
‘But if the anxiety is natural, the hope is natural too Many members of the League believe that there are two ways of fighting the franchise—a negative and a positive way. They believe that while the more extreme and bigoted Suffragists can only be met by an attitude of resolute and direct opposition to an unpatriotic demand, there are in this country thousands of women, Anti-Suffragist at heart, or still undecided, who may be attracted to a positive and alternative programme, while they shrink from meeting the Suffragist claim with a simple ‘No.’ Their mind and judgment tell them that there are many things still to be done, both for women, and the country, that women ought to be doing, and if they are asked merely to acquiesce in the present state of things, they rebel, and will in the end rather listen to Suffragist persuasion and adopt Suffragist methods. But the recent action of the executive opens to such women a new field of positive action—without any interference with the old. How immeasurably would the strength of the League be increased, say the advocates of what has been called ‘the forward policy,’ if in every town or district, where we have a branch, we had also a Local Government Committee, affiliated not to the present W.L.G.S., which is a simple branch of the Suffrage propaganda, but to the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League! The women’s local government movement, which has been almost killed in the last two years by Suffragist excesses and the wrath provoked by them in the nation, would then pass over into the hands of those better able to use without abusing it. Anti-Suffrage would profit, and the nation also.”
Mrs. Ward looked forward, indeed, to the regular organization of women’s work and influence on these lines, culminating in the election, by the women members of local bodies, of a central committee in London which would inevitably acquire immense influence on legislation as well as administration in all matters affecting women and children. “Such a Committee,” she said to an American audience in 1908, “might easily be strengthened by the addition to it of representatives from those government offices most closely concerned with the administration of laws concerning women and children; and no Government, in the case of any new Bill before the House of Commons, could possibly afford to ignore the strongly expressed opinion of such a committee, backed up as it could easily be by agitation in the country. In this way, it seems to me, all those questions of factory and sanitary legislation, which are now being put forward as stalking-horses by the advocates of the franchise, could be amply dealt with, without rushing us into the dangers and the risks, in which the extension of the suffrage to women, on the same terms as men, must ultimately land us.”
This passage shows very clearly Mrs. Ward’s belief in the duty of educated women to work for their fellows. She did not by any means wish them to sit at home all day with their embroidery frames, but looked forward instead to the steady development of what she called women’s “legitimate influence” in politics—the influence of a sane and informed opinion, working in collaboration with Parliament, which should not only remove the remaining grievances and disabilities of women, but hold a watching brief on all future legislation affecting their interests. Decidedly Mrs. Ward was no democrat. She was willing to wear herself out for Mrs. Smith, of Peabody Buildings, and her children, but she could not believe that it would do Mrs. Smith any good to become the prey of the political agitator.
Her activity in carrying on the Anti-Suffrage campaign from 1908 to 1914 was astonishing, considering how heavily burdened she was at the same time with her literary work and with the constant pressure of her Play Centres and Vacation Schools. She was practically the only woman speaker of the first rank on her own side, except for the rare appearances in public of Miss Violet Markham, so that the Branches of the Anti-Suffrage League formed in the great towns were all anxious to have her to speak, and she felt bound to accept a certain number of such invitations. She went to Birmingham, Manchester and Sheffield in 1909; she led a deputation to Mr. Asquith in 1910 and another at a more critical moment in December, 1911; she wrote a series of articles in the Standard on “The Case against Women’s Suffrage” in October, 1911, besides carrying on an active correspondence in The Times, as occasion arose, against Lady Maclaren, Mrs. Fawcett, or Mr. Zangwill; she spoke at Newcastle, Bristol and Oxford early in 1912, and at a great meeting in the Queen’s Hall, just before the fiasco of the Liberal Reform Bill, in January, 1913. At all these meetings the prospect of Suffragette interruptions weighed upon her like a nightmare. The militant agitation was, however, a very potent source of reinforcement to the Anti-Suffrage ranks throughout this period, so that although Mrs. Ward groaned as a citizen at every new device the Militants put forth for plaguing the community, she rejoiced as an Anti-Suffragist. The most definite annoyance to which she herself was subjected by the Suffragettes occurred at Bristol, where she addressed a huge meeting in February, 1912, in company with Lord Cromer and Mr. Charles Hobhouse, M.P. A devoted lady had found a place of concealment among the organ-pipes behind the platform, from which post of vantage, as the Bristol Times put it, “she heard an excellent recital of music at close quarters, and for a few minutes addressed a vast meeting in a muffled voice which uttered indistinguishable words.” She and a number of her fellows were ejected after the usual unhappy scrimmage, and Mrs. Ward and Mr. Hobhouse were allowed to proceed. But whether in consequence of this or as a mere coincidence, the Bristol Branch became one of the strongest of the League’s off-shoots, devoting itself, to Mrs. Ward’s intense satisfaction, to much useful work on local and municipal bodies.
Her opposition to Mrs. Fawcett’s organization was, of course, conducted on very different lines from this. Quite early in the campaign, in February, 1909, a debate was arranged to take place at the Passmore Edwards Settlement (under the auspices of the St. Pancras Branch of the Women’s Suffrage Society) between the two protagonists, Mrs. Ward and Mrs. Fawcett. The organizers of the meeting were besieged with applications for seats. Mrs. Ward reserved 150 for herself and the Anti-Suffrage League, while about 300 went to the Suffrage Society, so that the voting was a foregone conclusion; but the debate itself reached a high level of excellence, though it suffered from the usual fault which besets such tournaments—that the champions did not really meet each other’s arguments, but cantered on into the void, discharging their ammunition and returning gracefully to their starting-points when time was called.
“Surely,” wrote Mrs. Ward afterwards to her old friend, Miss McKee, the Chairman of the St. Pancras Suffrage Society, “surely you don’t think that Mrs. Fawcett answered my main contentions! Does anyone deny the inequality of wage?—but what Mrs. Fawcett never attempted to prove was how the vote could affect it. And why compare doctor and nurse? Does not the doctor pay for a long and costly training, while the nurse is paid her living at least from the beginning? Would it not have been fairer to compare woman doctor with man doctor, and then to show that under the L.C.C. at the present moment medical appointments are open to both women and men, and the salaries are equal?”
It could not be expected that such combatants would influence each other, but Mrs. Ward’s campaign went far to influence the doubting multitude, torn by conflicting counsels, harassed by the Militants, worried by accounts of prison tortures suffered by the “martyrettes,” and generally bothered by the obscuring of the good old fight between Liberals and Tories which the importation of the Suffrage into every by-election caused. The Suffrage battle was indeed waged upon and around the vile body of the Liberal Party in a very special degree from 1908 to 1914, for Mr. Asquith was Prime Minister, and Mr. Asquith—encouraged thereto by every device of provocation and exasperation which the Militants could spring upon him—was an Anti-Suffragist. Yet the influence of his Suffragist colleagues and of the constitutional agitation throughout the country was sufficient to induce him, in November, 1911, to give a very favourable answer to a deputation introduced by Mrs. Fawcett, who put to him a series of questions with regard to the Reform Bill announced by the Government for the Session of 1912 and the possibility of adding Suffrage amendments to it. The Suffragists withdrew with high hopes of a real measure of enfranchisement in the ensuing year. But less than a month later Mr. Asquith was receiving a similar deputation from the Anti-Suffrage League, introduced by Lord Curzon and including Mrs. Ward, Miss Violet Markham and Mr. McCallum Scott. His reply showed unmistakably that he was exceedingly glad to have his hands strengthened by the “Antis” in his own domestic camp, and he only begged them to carry on their crusade with the utmost vigour, since “as an individual I am in entire agreement with you that the grant of the parliamentary suffrage to women in this country would be a political mistake of a very disastrous kind.”
When the Session of 1912 opened it was evident that very strong influences were at work within the walls of Parliament for the defeat of the “Conciliation Bill,” which was due to come up for Second Reading at the end of March, and it is significant that Mrs. Ward was able to say, at a meeting of the Oxford Branch of the Anti-Suffrage League held on March 15, that “Woman Suffrage is in all probability killed for this Session and this Parliament.” The prophecy was partly fulfilled; like the prayers of Homer’s heroes, Zeus “heard part, and part he scattered to the winds.” At any rate, in the Session of 1912, not only was the Conciliation Bill defeated on March 28, by fourteen votes (after its very striking victory the year before), but the Suffrage amendments to the Reform Bill never even came up for consideration. At the very end of a long Session, that is in January, 1913, the Speaker ruled that the Bill had been so seriously altered by the amendments regarding male franchise already passed that it was not, in fact, the same Bill as had received Second Reading, while there were also “other amendments regarding female suffrage” to come which would make it still more vitally different. For these reasons he directed the withdrawal of the Bill. The fury of the Suffragists at the “trick” which had been played them may be imagined, but apart from the sanctity of Mr. Speaker’s rulings I think it is evident that the lassitude and discouragement about the Suffrage which pervaded the House of Commons at that time, and which contributed to the withdrawal of the Bill, was largely due to the recognition that there was a considerable body of Anti-Suffrage opinion in the country, both amongst men and women, the strength of which had not been realized before Mrs. Ward began her campaign. Well might she draw attention to this at a great meeting held at the Queen’s Hall on January 20, when it was still expected that the Suffrage amendments would be moved:
‘Naturally, I am reminded as I stand here, of all that has happened in the four and a half years since our League was founded. All I can tell you is, that we have put up a good fight; and I am amazed at what we have been able to do. Just throw your minds back to 1908. The militant organization was fast over-running the country; the cause of Women Suffrage had undoubtedly been pushed to the front, and for the moment benefited by the immense advertisement it had received; our ears were deafened by the noise and the shouting; and it looked as though the Suffrage might suddenly be carried before the country, the real country, had taken it seriously at all. The Second Readings of various Franchise Bills had been passed, and were still to be passed, by large majorities. There was no organized opposition. Suffragist opinions were entrenched in the universities and the schools, and between the ardour of the Suffragists and the apathy of the nation generally the situation was full of danger.
‘What has happened since? An opposition, steadily growing in importance and strength, has spread itself over the United Kingdom. Men and women who had formerly supported the Suffrage, looked it in the face, thought again and withdrew. Every item in the Suffragist claim has been contested; every point in the Suffragist argument has been investigated, and, as I think, overthrown. It is a great deal more difficult to-day than it was then to go about vaguely and passionately preaching that votes will raise wages in the ordinary market—that nothing can be done for the parasitic trades and sweated women without the women’s vote—for what about the Trade Boards Bill? or that nothing can be done to put down organized vice without the women’s vote—for what about the Criminal Law Amendment Bill? or that nothing can be done to help and protect children, without women’s votes—for what about the Children’s Act, the First Offenders’ Act, the new Children’s Courts and the Children’s Probationary Officers, the vast growth of the Care Committees, and all their beneficent work, due initially to the work of a woman, Miss Margaret Frere?
‘Witness, too, the increasing number of women on important Commissions: University—Divorce—Insurance; the increasing respect paid to women’s opinions; the strengthening of trade unionism among women; the steady rise in the average wage.
‘No, the Suffragist argument that women are trampled on and oppressed, and can do nothing without the vote, has crumbled in their hands. It had but to be examined to be defeated.
‘Meanwhile, the outrages and the excitement of the extreme Suffragist campaign gave many people pause. Was it to this we were committing English politics? Did not the whole development throw a new and startling light on the effect of party politics—politics so exciting as politics are bound to be in such a country as England—on the nerves of women? Women as advisers, as auxiliaries, as the disinterested volunteers of politics, we all know, and as far as I am concerned, cordially welcome. But women fighting for their own hands—fighting ultimately for the political control of men in men’s affairs—women in fierce and direct opposition to men—that was new—that gave us, as the French say, furiously to think!
‘And now, the coming week will be critical enough, anxious enough; but we all know that if any Suffrage amendment is carried in the House, it can only be by a handful of votes—none of your majorities of 160 or 170 as in the past.
‘And our high hope is that none will pass, that every Suffrage amendment will be defeated.
“That state of things is the exact measure of what has been done by us, the Anti-Suffrage party, to meet the Suffragist arguments and to make the nation understand what such a revolution really means—though I admit that Mrs. Pankhurst has done a good deal! It is the exact measure of the national recoil since 1908, and if fortune is on our side next week, we have only to carry on the fight resolutely and steadily to the end in order finally to convince the nation.”
After the collapse of the Government Reform Bill just described, the deadlock in the Parliamentary situation as regards Women’s Suffrage continued right down to the outbreak of the War. Mrs. Fawcett transferred the allegiance of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies to the Labour Party, the only party which was prepared to back the principle of women’s votes through thick and thin; the Militants continually increased in numbers, agitation and violence, and Mrs. Ward and her friends concentrated their energies more and more on the positive side of their programme, that is on the active development of women’s work in Local Government. But it was a heavy burden. Mrs. Ward felt, as she said in a speech at Oxford in 1912, that “it is a profound saying that nothing is conquered until it is replaced. Before the Suffrage movement can be finally defeated, or rather transformed, we who are its opponents must not only have beaten and refuted the Suffrage argument, but we must have succeeded in showing that there is a more excellent way towards everything that the moderate Suffragist desires, and we must have kindled in the minds, especially of the young, hopes and ideals for women which may efface and supersede those which have been held out to them by the leaders of the Suffrage army.”
Her artistic imagination was already at work on the problem, for in 1913 she wrote her Suffrage novel, Delia Blanchflower, in which the reader of to-day may still enjoy her closely observed study of the militant temperament, in Gertrude Marvell and her village followers, while on Delia herself, an ardent militant when the story opens, the gradual effect is traced of the English traditions of quiet public service, as exemplified—naturally!—in the person of the hero. Incidentally it may here be remarked that Mrs. Ward always believed that her Anti-Suffrage activities, culminating in the writing of this novel, had a markedly bad effect on the circulation of her books. Certainly she was prepared to suffer for her opinions, for the task of diverting and of carrying forward the Women’s Movement into other lines than those which led to Westminster was one that was to wear her out prematurely, though her gallant spirit never recognized its hopelessness.
Her organized attempt to give effect to these aspirations, in the foundation (early in 1914) of the “Joint Advisory Council” between Members of Parliament and Women Social Workers, arose out of the stand which she made within the National Union of Women Workers[32] for the neutrality of that body on the Suffrage question. The National Union was bound by its constitution to favour “no one policy” in national affairs, and many moderate Suffragists agreed with Mrs. Ward that sufficient ad hoc Societies existed already for carrying on the Suffrage campaign, and that it would have been wiser for the National Union to remain aloof from it altogether. But the feeling among the rank and file of the Union was too strong for the Executive, so that in the autumn of 1912 a Suffrage resolution was passed and sent up to the Prime Minister and all Members of the House of Commons. Mrs. Ward protested, but suspended her resignation until the next Annual Conference, which met at Hull in October, 1913. There Mrs. Ward’s resolutions were all voted down by the Suffragist majority, so that she and some of her friends felt that they had no choice but to secede from the Union, on the ground that its original constitution had been violated. They drew up and sent to the Press a Manifesto in which the following passage occurred:
“Under these circumstances it is proposed to enlarge and strengthen the protest movement, and to provide it, if possible, with a new centre and rallying-point for social work involving, probably, active co-operation with a certain number of Members of Parliament, who, on wholly neutral ground from which the question of Suffrage, for or against, has been altogether excluded, desire the help and advice of women in such legislation.”
Mrs. Ward had, throughout the controversy, carried on an active and most amicable correspondence with her old friend, Mrs. Creighton, the President of the National Union of Women Workers, who had for some years been a convert to Women’s Suffrage, on the ground that, since women had already, for good or ill, entered the political arena with their various Party Associations, it would be more straight-forward to have them inside than outside the political machine. Mrs. Ward now wrote to tell her of the progress of her idea for a “Joint Advisory Committee”:
“STOCKS,
”December 18, 1913.
...“The scheme has been shaping beyond my hopes, and will I hope, be ready for publication before Parliament meets. What we have been aiming at is a kind of Standing Committee composed equally of Members from all parts of the House of Commons, and both sides of the Suffrage question—and women of experience in social work. I do not, I hope, at all disguise from myself the difficulties of the project, and yet I feel that it ought to be very useful, and to develop into a permanent adjunct of the House of Commons. From this Joint Committee the Suffrage question will be excluded, but it will contain a dozen of the leading Suffragists in the House, which ought, I think, to make it clear that it is no Anti conspiracy!—but a bona-fide attempt to get Antis and Pros to work together on really equal terms.”
She was much gratified by the cordial response to her invitation on the part of M.P.’s of all shades of opinion, while some seventy women—both Suffragists and “Antis”—representing every field of social work, presently joined the Committee. Naturally the reproach levelled against it by those who did not believe in it was that the Committee was wholly self-appointed, but Mrs. Ward replied that, self-appointed or not, it was an instrument for getting things done, and that it would soon prove its usefulness. Under the Chairmanship of Sir Charles Nicholson, M.P., the Committee had held four meetings at the House of Commons between April and July, 1914, and had got through a great deal of practical work in the drafting of various amendments to Bills then before the House, when the curtain was rung down on all such fruitful and peaceable activities. Henceforth the guns were to speak, and such things as the education of crippled children, or the pressing of a wider qualification for women members of local bodies, were to disappear within the shadow that fell over the whole country. So at least it appeared at the time, but the Joint Advisory Council, like all really practical bodies, survived the shock, and lived to devote to the special questions arising from the War the experience gained in these first meetings.
The last act in the drama of Women’s Suffrage found Mrs. Ward, as usual, active and on the alert, and still unconvinced of the necessity for the measure, or, still more, of the competence of the Parliament of 1917 to deal with it. It will be remembered that the question arose again on the “Representation of the People Bill” which the Government felt bound to bring in before the death of the existing Parliament in order to remedy the crying injustices of registration which deprived most of the fighting men and many of the munition workers of their votes. The opportunity was seized by the Suffragists to press the claims of women once more upon Parliament and public, and this time the response was overwhelmingly favourable. The pluck and endurance shown by women in all the multifarious activities of the War had brought the public round to their side; the men at the front were believed to be in favour of it, the militant outrages had ceased, and, last but not least, there was now a lifelong Suffragist at the head of affairs. The Speaker’s Conference, which reported on January 27, 1917, decided “by a majority” that “some measure of women’s suffrage should be conferred.” It was evident that the current of opinion was setting strongly in favour of the women’s claim, but Mrs. Ward still felt it to be her duty to protest, and to organize the latent opposition which certainly existed in the country. She wrote an eloquent letter to The Times in May, pointing out the obvious truth that the country had not been consulted, that the existing Parliament had twice rejected the measure and was now a mere rump, with some 200 Members absent on war service; she denied in a passage of great force the plea based on “equality of service” between men and women, appealing to the grave-yards in France and Flanders which she had seen with her own eyes, as evidence of the eternal inequality, and finally she pleaded for a large extension of the women’s municipal vote, in order to provide an electorate which might be consulted by Referendum. The Referendum was in fact adopted by the now dwindling Anti-Suffrage party in Parliament as their policy; but the House of Commons would have none of it, and the Second Reading of the Bill, which included the Suffrage clause, was carried by 329 to 40. It is obvious, of course, that in an elective Assembly, when the members are once convinced that a large increase in the electorate is about to be made, anxiety for their seats will make them very chary of voting against the new electors. Hence Mrs. Ward had to bewail many desertions. The Bill was finally passed by the House of Commons on December 7; but there still remained the Lords. Here the opposition was likely to be far more formidable, for the Lords had no hungry electors waiting for them, nor were they so susceptible as the Lower House to waves of sentiment such as that which had overspread press and public in favour of Women’s Suffrage. It was here, therefore, that Mrs. Ward organized her last resistance. The January Nineteenth Century appeared with an article by her entitled “Let Women Say,” appealing to the Lords to insist on a Referendum, while in the first week of January she (acting as Chairman of the National League for Opposing Women’s Suffrage) issued a Memorial to which she had obtained the signatures of about 2,000 women war-workers, and sent it to the press and to the Members of the House of Lords.
Lord Bryce wrote to her in response (January 8, 1918):