SUFFRAGETTE TO SUFFER

Gisborne Times, Volume XXX, Issue 3481, 22 March 1912, Page 7

SUFFRAGETTE TO SUFFER

A HEAVY SENTENCE. SIX MONTHS’ IMPRISONMENT. [UNITED PRESS ASSOCIATION—COPYRIGHT] LONDON, March 20. A suffragette at Pitfield ban been sentenced to six months in the second division- . Tile Magistrate said tliat the sentence would, 1 have beeni severer, but that accused was suffering from illness, [The disgust, almost amounting to nausea, that has been excited by the hideous displays of suffragette vandalism during the last few weeks is partially relieved by the. appeal now made to our sense of humor. ‘ 'Miss Pankhurst,” we are told, “defended the wrecking of innocent tradesmen’s windows on the .ground that no section was innocent.” This reasoning-con-tains the language of truth if not of relevance. . For, as the apostle says, alii luave sinned, and if w© were all treated according to our deserts we biave the highest of profane authorities for believing that few, if any, would escape whipping. Miss Panichurst’s pemise that “no section is innocent” is, then, beyond challenge, •but what about the inference? If the lack of tliat innocence which has been beyond the each of any mortal since the Fall of Adam—or should wa ■not sav Eve?—entitles us to have our windows smashed, why are the suffragettes to he exemnt? The blundering masculine intelligence has indeed been extending the logic of the suffragettes to their own windows, n the reply is that the suffragettes are politically innocent because they are politically powerless, it is unfdrtun'ately clear that neither Westminster Abbey nor St. Paul’s Cathedral nor the National Gallery nor the Elgin Marbles can claim the benefit of any such distinction- They have all sinThey are all the work of blun-dering,-guilty man, and are all. protected by odious, : one-sided, manmade- laws. Therefore they may all have to come down 1 before the logic of the Women’s Social and Political Union. “If Friday’s method was insufficient,” says Miss Christa be], “the women would terrorise the whole of the male community.” Certainly men will deserve all that they get if they are going to yield to such rodomontade as this. One reply of the brutal myrmidons of man-made law is the arrest of Miss Pankhurst and two of her accomplices on a cliarge of conspiring to incite persons to damage property. We- trust (said the Post recently) that the charges will he pressed home. The lunacy has been played with'too long. The gaols of England are quite large enough to accommodate all the patients and provide iieace for the objects of their lawless and senseless violence. If this punishment and protection cannot he provided by law, it is inevitable that the lynch law to which these frenzied Moenads have appealed will he turned against them, with results that must from every point of view be more deplorable.]