My own story
explosion; the foreman in charge of the damaged house, who told the
cost of the damages, and described the explosives, etc., found on the
premises; several police officers who told of finding hairpins and a
woman's rubber golosh in the house, and so on. Absolutely nothing was
brought out that tended to show that the Suffragettes had anything to do
with the affair. The Judge noted this for he said to Mr. Bodkin:
"I am not quite sure how you present this case. There are two ways of
looking at it. Do you only ask the jury to say that the defendant
specifically counselled the perpetration of this crime, or do you also
say that, looking at her speeches that you read--assuming you prove that
they were uttered--that the language used being a general incitement to
damage property, any one who acted on this invitation and perpetrated
this outrage would be incited by her to do it?"
Mr. Bodkin replied that the latter assumption was correct.
"I say that the speeches generally are incitement to all kinds of acts
of violence against property, and that they present evidence of attacks
against property and a particular individual, and that there is evidence
in the speeches which have been read, and which will be proved, of
admissions by Mrs. Pankhurst of having been connected with the
particular outrage in a way which makes her in law an accessory before
the fact."
"But you do not confine the case to the latter way of putting it?"
"No," replied Mr. Bodkin.
"Even if the jury are satisfied," said the Judge, "that Mrs. Pankhurst
was not directly connected with this outrage by counselling it, you
still ask the jury to say that by counselling, as you say she had in the
speeches, the destruction of property, especially that belonging to a
particular gentleman, anybody who acted on that and committed this
outrage would have been incited by her to do it?"
"Yes, my lord."
"I think, Mrs. Pankhurst, you now understand the way it is put?" asked
the Judge.
"I understand it quite well, my lord," I replied.
Proceedings were resumed on the following day, and the examination of
witnesses for the prosecution went on. At the close of the examination,
the Judge inquired whether I desired to call any witnesses. I replied:
"I do not desire to give evidence or to call any witnesses, but I desire
to address your Lordship."
I began by objecting to some of the things Mr. Bodkin had said in his
speech which concerned me personally. He had referred to me--or at least
his words conveyed the suggestion--that I was a woman riding about in my
motor car inciting other women to do acts which entail imprisonment and
great suffering, while I, perhaps indulging in some curious form of
pleasure, was protected, or thought myself protected, from serious
consequences. I said that Mr. Bodkin knew perfectly well that I shared
all the dangers the other women faced, that I had been in prison three
times, serving two of the sentences in full, and being treated like an
ordinary felon--searched, put in prison clothes, eating prison fare,
given solitary confinement and conforming to all the abominable rules
imposed upon women who commit crimes in England. I thought I owed it to
myself, especially as the same suggestions--in regard to the luxury in
which I lived, supported by the members of the W. S. P. U.--had been
made, not only by Mr. Bodkin in court, but by members of the Government
in the House of Commons--I thought I owed it to myself to say that I
owned no motor car and never had owned one. The car in which I
occasionally rode was owned by the organisation and was used for general
propaganda work. In that car, and in cars owned by friends I had gone
about my work as a speaker in the Woman Suffrage movement. It was
equally untrue, I said, that some of us were making incomes of L1,000 to
L1,500 a year out of the suffrage movement, as had actually been alleged
in the debates in the House in which members of Parliament were trying
to decide how to crush militancy. No woman in our organisation was
making any such income, or anything remotely like it. Myself, I had
sacrificed a considerable portion of my income because I had to
surrender a very important part of it in order to be free to do what I
thought was my duty in the movement.
Addressing myself to my defence I told the Court that it was a very
serious condition of things when a large number of respectable and
naturally law abiding people, people of upright lives, came to hold the
law in contempt, came seriously to making up their minds that they were
justified in breaking the law.
"The whole of good government," I said, "rests upon acceptance of the
law, upon respect of the law, and I say to you seriously, my lord, and
gentlemen of the jury, that women of intelligence, women of training,
women of upright life, have for many years ceased to respect the laws of
this country. It is an absolute fact, and when you look at the laws of
this country as they effect women it is not to be wondered at."
At some length I went over these laws, laws that made it possible for
the Judge to send me, if found guilty, to prison for fourteen years,
while the maximum penalty for offences of the most revolting kind
against little girls was only two years' imprisonment. The laws of
inheritance, the laws of divorce, the laws of guardianship of
children--all so scandalously unjust to women, I sketched briefly, and I
said that not only these laws and others, but the administration of the
laws fell so far short of adequacy that women felt that they must be
permitted to share the work of cleaning up the entire situation. I tried
here to tell of certain dreadful things that I had learned as the wife
of a barrister, things about some of the men in high places who are
entrusted with the administration of the law, of a judge of Assizes
where many hideous crimes against women were tried, this judge himself
being found dead one morning in a brothel, but the Court would not allow
me to go into personalities, as he called it, with regard to
"distinguished people," and told me that the sole question before the
jury was whether or not I was guilty as charged. I must speak on that
subject and on no other.
After a hard fight to be allowed to tell the jury the reasons why women
had lost respect for the law, and were making such a struggle in order
to become law makers themselves, I closed my speech by saying:
"Over one thousand women have gone to prison in the course of this
agitation, have suffered their imprisonment, have come out of prison
injured in health, weakened in body, but not in spirit. I come to stand
my trial from the bedside of one of my daughters, who has come out of
Holloway Prison, sent there for two months' hard labour for
participating with four other people in breaking a small pane of glass.
She has hunger-struck in prison. She submitted herself for more than
five weeks to the horrible ordeal of feeding by force, and she has come
out of prison having lost nearly two stone in weight. She is so weak
that she cannot get out of her bed. And I say to you, gentlemen, that is
the kind of punishment you are inflicting upon me or any other woman who
may be brought before you. I ask you if you are prepared to send an
incalculable number of women to prison--I speak to you as representing
others in the same position--if you are prepared to go on doing that
kind of thing indefinitely, because that is what is going to happen.
There is absolutely no doubt about it. I think you have seen enough even
in this present case to convince you that we are not women who are
notoriety hunters. We could get that, heaven knows, much more cheaply if
we sought it. We are women, rightly or wrongly, convinced that this is
the only way in which we can win power to alter what for us are
intolerable conditions, absolutely intolerable conditions. A London
clergyman only the other day said that 60 per cent. of the married women
in his parish were breadwinners, supporting their husbands as well as
their children. When you think of the wages women earn, when you think
of what this means to the future of the children of this country, I ask
you to take this question very, very seriously. Only this morning I have
had information brought to me which could be supported by sworn
affidavits, that there is in this country, in this very city of London
of ours, a regulated traffic, not only in women of full age, but in
little children; that they are being purchased, that they are being
entrapped, and that they are being trained to minister to the vicious
pleasures of persons who ought to know better in their positions of
life.
"Well, these are the things that have made us women determined to go on,
determined to face everything, determined to see this thing out to the
end, let it cost us what it may. And if you convict me, gentlemen, if
you find me guilty, I tell you quite honestly and quite frankly, that
whether the sentence is a long sentence, whether the sentence is a short
sentence, I shall not submit to it. I shall, the moment I leave this
court, if I am sent to prison, whether to penal servitude or to the
lighter form of imprisonment--because I am not sufficiently versed in
the law to know what his lordship may decide; but whatever my sentence
is, from the moment I leave this court I shall quite deliberately refuse
to eat food--I shall join the women who are already in Holloway on the
hunger strike. I shall come out of prison, dead or alive, at the
earliest possible moment; and once out again, as soon as I am physically
fit I shall enter into this fight again. Life is very dear to all of us.
I am not seeking, as was said by the Home Secretary, to commit suicide.
I do not want to commit suicide. I want to see the women of this country
enfranchised, and I want to live until that is done. Those are the
feelings by which we are animated. We offer ourselves as sacrifices,
just as your forefathers did in the past, in this cause, and I would ask
you all to put this question to yourselves:--Have you the right, as
human beings, to condemn another human being to death--because that is
what it amounts to? Can you throw the first stone? Have you the right to
judge women?
"You have not the right in human justice, not the right by the
constitution of this country, if rightly interpreted, to judge me,
because you are not my peers. You know, every one of you, that I should
not be standing here, that I should not break one single law--if I had
the rights that you possess, if I had a share in electing those who make
the laws I have to obey; if I had a voice in controlling the taxes I am
called upon to pay, I should not be standing here. And I say to you it
is a very serious state of things. I say to you, my lord, it is a very
serious situation, that women of upright life, women who have devoted
the best of their years to the public weal, that women who are engaged
in trying to undo some of the terrible mistakes that men in their
government of the country have made, because after all, in the last
resort, men are responsible for the present state of affairs--I put it
to you that it is a very serious situation. You are not accustomed to
deal with people like me in the ordinary discharge of your duties; but
you are called upon to deal with people who break the law from selfish
motives. I break the law from no selfish motive. I have no personal end
to serve, neither have any of the other women who have gone through this
court during the past few weeks, like sheep to the slaughter. Not one of
these women would, if women were free, be law-breakers. They are women
who seriously believe that this hard path that they are treading is the
only path to their enfranchisement. They seriously believe that the