September 23, 1911, anonymously authored article in M.A.P.

Emily Davison’s cogent and passionate denunciation of Lloyd George’s duplicitous tactics is

embedded in a fragment of an article from M.A.P. It is included here because Davison saved

several copies of the fragment, and may have been justifiably proud of the way she identified

the twists and turns the Liberal government executed in its attempt to prevent a suffrage bill

from ever becoming law without actually acknowledging that failure was its goal.

Recently I asked Suffragists what grounds they had for describing Mr. Lloyd George as an

opponent of votes for women. Miss Emily Wilding Davison sends me a long letter on this

subject from which I quote the following:

“We account the Chancellor of the Exchequer as the most dangerous of our foes, for

the well-known reason that ‘he that is not for us is against us.’ Now, Mr. Lloyd George, with

all his glib assurances that he is in favour of Woman Suffrage, has never done one single

deed to prove his bona fides. More than this, he has even done several deeds which justify

our opinion of him.

“It was his treachery, and that of Mr. Winston Churchill, which killed last year’s

Conciliation Bill. If those two members of the Cabinet had not stood up and said that they

would not support the Bill because it was not sufficiently wide (i.e., because it was the first

Woman Suffrage Bill which had ever been seriously treated in the House of Commons), that

Bill would undoubtedly have gone to Grand Committee upstairs, and been passed. But their

bold treachery stiffened the backs of some of the waverers, who followed their lead.

“This convincing example of Mr. Lloyd George’s concealed desire to smash up every

chance of Woman Suffrage has been followed up by his subtle suggestion to the Liberal

Suffragists when they met in Committee recently, that they might try and commandeer Mr.

Asquith’s promise of facilities for a wider Suffrage Bill on Woman Suffrage, i.e., a Bill

doomed from the beginning.

“Finding that his ideas were not too favourably received, he changed them to the

tune of pushing forward the Conciliation Bill next session, and then widening (i.e., killing) it

by amendments. He even made the ‘slim’ [crafty] move of asserting that the facilities promised for

the Conciliation Bill could be deliberately stolen for any other Suffrage Bill which admitted

of amendent [sic] and received a Second Reading. In this misstatement, however, he had

gone too far, as was proved of course by Mr. Asquith’s explicit answer to Lord Lytton’s

challenge upon the point. The facilities are for the Conciliation Bill and another.

“With such a record against him is it likely that any Suffragist, who is politically

awake, could possibly regard Mr. Lloyd George as anything but a ravening wolf in sheep’s

clothing, especially in view of the fact that all the most genuine suffragists in the House of

Commons declare that the Conciliation Bill is the only one that has the remotest chance of

passing into law in the present House of Commons?”

[editor’s partial reply: Still, I do not see how the Chancellor can justly be called an

opponent of women’s suffrage. To be against a certain Bill dealing with women’s suffrage

does not mean that a man is against the principle of women’s suffrage. The fact is, that

most Suffragists are so anxious to see the thick end of the wedge—for the Conciliation

Bill is only the thin edge of the wedge—that they are apt to overlook the fact that the

Bill in question is eminently undemocratic and that it cannot appeal to people with the

democratic spirit strongly developed…]