LOSING THEIR FRIENDS.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXXVI, Issue 3979, 9 July 1913, Page 8

LOSING THEIR FRIENDS.

WOMEN’S INSANE CONDUCT.

POETESS’ CONDEMNATION

The latest escapades cf the militant suffragists have alienated their best friends and sympathisers. Mrs Ella Wheeler Wilcox, the American poetess, is tho author of the women’s hymn; she, too, repudiates the militants, and denounces them in scathing terms. “I am utterly and thoroughly out of patience and disgusted witli the perfectly insane conduct of the women over here,” she said. “There is one thing to do with them now—that is. to select a suitable island and to transport them. When they hunger strike, they should be allowed to starve, if they are so mad. “I am quite in sympathy with the idea of woman’s suffrage. The world has reached a point now when women should have a vote in the affairs of the nation ; but one cannot have one extenuating word to say for those women who aro engineering and carrying out acts of vandalism. “As a theosophist, I think that they have put themselves into such a mental state that they are obsessed by the disembodied /intelligences or revolutionaries. They have allowed themselves to get into such a state of mind mat they have laid themselves open to tho influences of the forces of destruction. It is obvious that in all this they have seriously retarded their movement.

“Mere I a man and a politician, I should certainly pause and say: ‘These women are not sufficiently developed to have the vote while they conduct themselves in this manner. Me must postpone it.’ In America, I uni bound to sn v, there is no need for this view. The women’s movement has advanced much further there, along .normal lines. This is curious, because Englishwomen went into politics, and did remarkably well, long before ours.

‘The present line of the English movement is not truly progressive, and I am very sorry that they have my poem, ‘The Awakening,’ for their official song. There is certainly nothing in those lines which encourages or countenances their conduct in the remotest manner. One line runs, ‘They are throwing wide then* white the sun.’ These women axe throwing wide their windows to the darkness.

“As originally started, their movement was brilliant >-nd witty. The girl who chained herself to the grille of the House of Commons and was able to make her speech before they could unloose her compelled the attention of the world to woman’s suffrage. It was a witty idea, but it was the last interesting thing they did. It is simply a case new of the bull in the china shop, and about as intellectual.”