Page:The case for women's suffrage.djvu/163

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TACTICS
159

those demonstrations possible. They ignore the fact that it was bitter anger that prompted those defiant acts, and that anger has done queer things before now, even in other cases where superior persons thought that the franchise ought to be argued about dispassionately. It is just as important to convince the public that women are angry as it is to convince them that women are right; indeed it is more important, because it is more likely to ensure a respectful attention to their demands. If women are not really angry, or if not enough of them are angry to matter, or if, as some tell us, the knowledge that some women have lost patience is likely to make all other women more patient, there is an end of it; demonstrations are then only machinery, and must be managed accordingly; but to those who believe that these demonstrations mean anger, an anger that is becoming daily more bitter and more widely spread, it seems not only difficult to criticise them as tactics but almost impertinent to treat them as tactics at all. At any rate, the whole course of history teaches us that violence in resenting injustice has always made it more, and not less, likely that injustice will be remedied; and there is no particular reason why the injustice of withholding votes from women should be any exception.

Demonstrations, then, are valuable as tactics just so far as they mean something more than tactics; but when we come to questions of election policy we are in the region of tactics pure and simple. Here there are two main questions to be answered: First, what ought to be our immediate aim; what measure