I consider it an honor to have been asked to take up the pen from the date 1900, when my dear friend and colleague, the late Helen Blackburn, laid it down after writing the chapter on Great Britain for Volume IV of the History of Woman Suffrage. I am particularly fortunate in that it falls to my lot to include the year 1918, when Victory crowned our fifty years' struggle in these islands to obtain the Parliamentary franchise for women.
Several circumstances entirely outside our power of control combined to promote the rapid growth of the movement at the beginning of the XXth Century. The chief of these were the South African war, 1899-1902, and the death of Queen Victoria in 1901. The war with the Transvaal was caused by the refusal of President Kruger and his advisers to recognize the principle that taxation and representation should go together. The so-called Uitlanders, who formed a large proportion of the population of the Transvaal and provided by taxation a still larger proportion of its revenue, were practically excluded from representation. This led to intense irritation and ultimately to war. It was, therefore, inevitable that articles in the press and the speeches of British statesmen dealing with the war used arguments which might have been transferred without the alteration of a single word to women's suffrage speeches.
I have described on pages 29 and 30 of Women's Suffrage, a Short History of a Great Movement, the strong impulse which had been given to the electorial activity of British women by the
- ↑ The History is indebted for this chapter to Mrs. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, J.P., LL.D., who has been prominently connected with the movement for women's suffrage in Great Britain for nearly fifty years and was President of the National Association from 1904, when it was re-organized, until after the victory was won in 1918.
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