A few deaths might result (and did), and many injuries, but
the treatment they received would make such an impression on Mrs.
Pankhurst's followers that they would at last realize the futility
of measuring their puny force against the muscle of man. Force, as
the Premier had just said, must be the decisive factor.
But unfortunately for these calculations the large male crowd took
quite a different line. The day had gone by when men and boys were
wont to cry to some expounding Suffragette: "Go home and mind yer
biby." Dimly these toilers and moilers, these loafers and wasters
now understood that women of a courage rarely matched in man were
fighting for the cause of all ill-governed, mal-administered,
swindled, exploited people of either sex. The mass of men, _in_ the
mass, is chivalrous. It admires pluck, patience, and persistency. So
the crowd instead of aiding the police to knock sense into the women
began to take sides with the buffeted, brutalized and bleeding
Suffragettes.
Fortunately before the real fighting began, and no doubt as a stroke
of policy on the part of some Police Inspector, Mrs. Pankhurst
convoying the two frail old ladies--Dr. Garret Anderson and Susan
Knipper-Totes--champions of the Vote when Woman Suffrage was outside
practical politics--had reached the steps of the Strangers' entrance
to the House of Commons.
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