II

Appeal to the Press

(A Letter to the Daily News, 1911.)

I write as a supporter of woman’s suffrage, but not of militant suffragism. Whenever I have remonstrated with a militant Suffragist I have received this answer:

“We could not keep the movement before the eyes of the public without militant tactics, because the papers, with two or three exceptions, would not report peaceful work. For this reason we adopted our methods, and the event has justified us. We have advanced the cause—simply by forcing it on people’s attention in the only way open to us—more in the last three years than those who pursued peaceful methods had done in the last forty.”

Whatever may now be the feelings and intentions of the militant Suffragists, this answer did undoubtedly set forth the true reason for the inception of militant tactics.

All political and social movements in this country depend for vitality on catching the eye and the thought of the community. And we may draw one of two alternative morals from that prolonged silence of the Press towards woman’s suffrage which originally brought about the campaign of violence: Either, that men having possession of the organs of public opinion, deliberately kept them closed to the discussion of the political rights of women—a supposition, I should prefer not to entertain. Or, that reports of violence and sensationalism are more sought after than tales of reason and sobriety! Whichever the moral drawn, it is very discreditable to public feeling in this country.

Is it too late for those who are responsible for the Press to take the lead in removing that stigma? It is lugubrious that, in our England of free speech and fair play, in this nation hitherto supposed to excel in political sense, women should have found it necessary to advocate and advertise by mere sensationalism a political and social movement of more wide-reaching and universal nature than any now before the public; a movement of such epoch-making character that few people have at present grasped its real significance. Surely it is important that the people of this country should be educated in the reason and the rights of a question such as this. But in order that they may be so educated it is necessary that they should read, not the account of how “So-and-so’s windows were broken,” or of how “Such an one was arrested,” but arguments presented in speech and writing for and against suffrage.

The extent to which the formation of public opinion on any political measure depends on the publication in the Press of reason, pro and con., can be seen from the growth of the Tariff Reform Party, which a few years ago was a negligible faction. The imminence and gravity of this issue of woman’s suffrage can no longer be denied. It has to be faced. It will have to be decided. Does the Press of this country wish it to be decided by an electorate utterly unversed in its merits and demerits? Would the Press of this country wish any big political or social measure to be so decided? Is it just, generous, or politic that, when women try by peaceful and constitutional means to promulgate their cause, there should be silence? If there had not been this silence, militant suffragism would never have been born. By the removal of this silence militant suffragism may still be helped towards a natural death.

I appeal to all editors (whether friends or enemies of the movement), who have already shown themselves alive to what is rapidly becoming the desperate importance of this issue, to combine and advocate an alteration of the general Press policy—to advocate the throwing open of all journals to fair and full report, not of the sensational, but of the reasonable, sides, for and against, of woman’s suffrage. For, whether consciously or unconsciously, the general Press policy has hitherto been most unfortunate, and is fast contributing to the growth of a bitter feeling between the sexes, in the last degree noxious to the national life.