Yet for fear of wounding the national
sentimentality they must not be allowed to die; they must not be
saved from suicide by any action savouring of indecency; so they
must be tortured as prisoners hardly were in the worst days of the
Inquisition or at the worst-conducted public school of the Victorian
era.
But Vivie's gradually rising wrath was to be brought by degrees to
boiling-point through the spring of 1913, and to explode at last
over an incident more tragic than any one of the five or six hundred
cases of forcible feeding.
Early in 1913, the Speaker intimated that any insertion of a Woman
Suffrage Amendment into the Manhood Franchise Bill would be
inconsistent with some unwritten code of Parliamentary procedure of
which apparently he was the sole guardian and interpreter. Ministers
who had probably prepared this _coup_ months before went about
expressing hypocritical laments at the eccentricities of our
constitution; and the Franchise Act was abandoned. A little later,
frightened at the renewal of arson in town and country, at
interferences with their week-end golf courses, at the destruction
of mails in the letter-boxes, and the slashing of Old Masters at the
National Gallery (purchased at about five times their intrinsic
value by a minister who would not have spent one penny of national
money to encourage native art), the Cabinet let it be known that a
way would be found presently to give Woman Suffrage a clear run.
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