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WOMEN'S INTEREST IN DOMESTIC POLITICS
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the women's camp, as in all others, the new inspiration makes itself felt. Women too are emerging from the weary years of the reaction, are scanning old ideals and are finding that, though they burnt dimly in the days of despondency, they are shining brightly once more and are casting a clear light on the path of the future. Women who considered their rightful claims to full citizenship with lukewarmness are now falling under the influence of the new demands and are flocking alike into the old Suffrage Societies, and into the Women's Social and Political Union. Something deeper than their own narrow personal interests has gripped many of the women of England; on all sides one sees and hears it, among those women who gather to decorous Suffrage conventions in the provincial towns, in the masses of perfectly normal and respectable middle-class wives and daughters who walked in procession from Hyde Park to Exeter Hall on the 9th of last February, but most of all on the faces and in the voices of those women who have dared—exasperated beyond the bounds of patience by the unworthy tactics of a Government that calls itself Liberal—to strive to reach the House of Commons itself that they might urge their claims to a vote—claims nominally admitted to be just by a very large majority of that House—and who have in consequence served out their sentence of imprisonment as a testimony of the faith that is in them. And therefore if the Liberals ask why these things are done now, and not earlier, we can only reply that in us as among them—and many of us are (or were) Liberals—inertia and