Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 6.djvu/747

WOMEN S MOVEMENT IN THE UNITED KINGDOM 73! General Elections in 1910, in January and December. The Lib- eral, Labour and Nationalist group lost heavily in the second of these elections, their majority being reduced from 334 to 124. The Labour Party between these two elections had lost six seats but they were still forty strong, all definitely pledged to Women's Suffrage in the new Parliament which assembled in January, 1911. Our Bill had been carried on its second read- ing in 1910 by a majority of no but after the second General Election of 1910 it secured on May 5, 1911, a majority of 167; there were 55 pairs, only 88 members of Parliament going into the Lobby against us. The Bill on each of these occasions was of a very limited character; it proposed to enfranchise women-householders, widows and spinsters and would only have added about a million women to the Parliamentary register. It was called the Conciliation Bill, because it sought to conciliate the differences between different types of suffragists in the House of Commons, from the extreme Conservative who only cared for the representation of women of property, to the extreme Radical who demanded the enfranchisement of every woman. A committee was formed to promote the success of this bill in Parliament of which the Earl of Lytton was Chairman and Mr. H. N. Brailsford Hon. Sec. It was believed that the bill re-presented the greatest common measure of the House of Com- mons' belief in women's votes. The Labour Party were strongly in favour of a much wider enfranchisement of women but gen- erously waived their own preferences in order, as they believed, to get some sort of representation for women on the Statute Almost immediately after this large majority for I lie second reading of the Conciliation Bill in May, 1911, an official announcement was made by the Government that Mr. Asquith's promise of the previous November that an opportunity should be afforded for proceeding with the bill in all its stages would be fulfilled in the session of 1912. Ve were then in the most favourable position we had ever occupied: the ] f the Women's Suffrage Bill in the near future seemed a certainty. The "militants" had suspended all their methods of violence in order to i^ive the Conciliation Bill a chance, and, as just described, it had passed its second reading