I am inclined to think that the best general is he who never listens to warnings. Nobody, for instance, warned us not to hold a meeting in the Council Schools, where a number of apparently educated, if very young, gentlemen came to express their political opinions through the medium of motor-horns and chemical explosives. The warning would have made no difference, of course; the point is that it was never uttered. When, on the other hand, we announced that we meant to carry our election campaign into the black spot of the constituency, where a criminal population congregated thickly in a few mean streets, warnings came quick and fast. They were the normal warnings, telling how the police hesitated to penetrate there after dark, how it was never safe at any time of day for a woman to walk there alone, and so on, and so on. There is a black spot like that in most cities, and the same things, rightly or wrongly, are generally said about it. But when you are a pioneer, however humble a pioneer, you discover that the one person who may walk with safety in the heart of a criminal district is the rebel man or woman who is out fighting for a human cause.

No doubt, the elementary school child looks upon the Prime Minister who arranges for a general election to occur during the Christmas holidays as a sort of fairy godfather; but the pioneer, who hopes to advance her cause as a by-product of a Parliamentary election, would find the political situation considerably simplified by the elimination of the juvenile element. Anthropologists probably know all kinds of reasons why the young human creature always wants to throw things at what he cannot understand; and if I had to humanize the embryonic hooligan of our back streets, I believe I should begin by setting up a mysterious-looking target, a different one every day, in a prominent place, in order to gratify this elemental instinct at the least possible cost to the pioneer. Not having thought of this simple plan in time, however, those of us who first penetrated the black spot of our constituency on a canvassing expedition met with a good deal of concrete obstruction.

"I am used to banana skins," remarked one canvasser, on her return to the committee rooms; "I can even bear mud; and stones are never aimed with enough determination to matter much; but I should like to draw the line at red herrings. There is something so peculiarly atmospheric about red herrings."

"Chestnuts are worse," said another woman, producing the one that she had intercepted on its way towards her face. "When I am advancing a suffrage argument for the hundredth time, there is a nasty subtle significance about a chestnut."

The tax collector, happening to stroll in just then to buy a ticket for a meeting, kindly tendered us his sympathy. He had frequently to endure the same unfriendly treatment at the hands of children, he told us, when he visited their homes in his official capacity. This information did not meet with the response he evidently expected from us, and realizing that voteless women could not be reasonably expected to feel furiously hostile towards anybody who pelted a tax collector, he admitted a difference in the point of view and beat a tactful retreat, warning us as he went to refrain from attempting an open-air meeting in the criminal district.

"You won't do any good there," he assured us; "they are too stupid to understand, and they may make things very unpleasant for you."

This would have been true, perhaps, of an open-air meeting in a respectable neighbourhood, not to say of a drawing-room meeting anywhere. In a respectable, law-abiding district, it is always difficult and frequently dangerous to hold an open-air meeting. To begin with, you have to stand for some time without any audience at all, saying "We are the Suffragettes; we have come here to talk about votes for women," over and over again, with an ingratiating smile, to a policeman with a coldly detached air, and, perhaps, a young man on the opposite side of the road, who is longing to listen but dare not cross over for fear of being identified with lawless young women whose husbands and babies languish untended in the theoretical home. Afterwards, when these preliminary efforts have successfully assembled an audience, it is generally one that is too stupid to understand, and it frequently makes things unpleasant for the speaker. All this may be confidently expected to happen in respectable neighbourhoods, where the standard of conduct is conventional enough to have brought unconventionality within the jurisdiction of lynch law.

In the black spot of our constituency, however, these familiar difficulties scarcely seemed to exist for the open-air speaker, least of all the preliminary difficulty of collecting an audience. The moment our wagon appeared, flying the tricolour flag that stood for no party cry and for no party candidate, the audience came in rushes from all the alleys and dens in the neighbourhood, and in less than two minutes one looked down upon a swaying mass of tattered and slatternly humanity that would have been horribly pathetic if for one moment it had been less than human. As it was, one merely realized that when the narrow barrier of circumstance that separates the fortunates from the unfortunates of this world has once been swept away, human points of contact are multiplied, not diminished.

The audience naturally gave the speaker in the lorry no time to make philosophic reflections.

"Don't look as though she'd been fed on skilly, do she?" was a sally that produced instant applause.

"Here, miss!" shouted a young hooligan, pushing into prominence a good-looking girl whose open, laughing face might have belonged to any child of twenty in any sheltered home. "She's been to 'Olloway; can she have a vote?"

"Not much!" roared the crowd.

Our militant member, distributing leaflets on the edge of the crowd, smiled on the girl as she went shuffling off. "I've been to prison myself," she said, by way of breaking the ice; "what can you have done at your age to get there?"

The girl threw back her head with another laugh. "Oh, a drop of beer and a few words with a copper!" was the easy reply.

After that, it was a simple matter to get into conversation, and other women, who were not laughing, gathered round to listen.

"You Suffragettes have made things in the 'jug' a lot better for us pore women," said one, more intelligent-looking than the rest. "They give us chiny mugs now, 'stead of them tins, and——"

"I 'ope as you'll git inter Parlyment, that I do!" chimed in another.

"Yuss! Good luck to you!" cried a chorus of voices.

They vented their new-found enthusiasm upon a bibulous gentleman, who was asserting with drowsy monotony that he didn't want women to have votes, not he! He wanted them to love, honour, and obey——

"Stow it!" they broke in impatiently. "Forgettin' your manners, ain't you?"

The woman in the lorry was telling them why she went to prison, two months ago. She soon had her audience well in hand, human points of contact not being far to seek in a crowd to whom it was at least unnecessary to explain that women did not go to gaol for fun. A passer-by, who happened to drift there from the prosperous part of the constituency, stopped to make this hackneyed insinuation and was well hooted for his pains by a crowd that knew more than he did of the experiences described by the speaker. Even the drowsy sentimentalist, realizing, one might almost suppose, that his proper place was rather at a drawing-room meeting than at a street-corner one, went elsewhere in search of love and obedience; and the crowd of derelicts that remained, growing more numerous every minute, pressed closer and closer to the lorry till they swarmed up the wheels and over the sides and sat at the feet of the woman who had been where they had been, and suffered what they had suffered, for a cause they dimly began to understand because it appeared to be connected with prison and suffering. Even their primitive minds could receive an impression of the woman standing up above them, against the crude light of the street lamp, standing for something that was going to bring a little warmth and brilliance into a cold neutral world, the warmth and brilliance that they had somehow missed. Emphatically, these people were not of the stuff that melodrama and novelettes are made of. They had never discovered what is sensationally called the romance of crime, and there was nothing splendid or attractive in the offences that had sent them to gaol. Some day or another, in a dull past, they had exchanged the dinginess of unemployment for the ingloriousness of petty crime, that was all.

A woman, bedraggled and dishevelled, strayed across from the public-house and stood for a moment gazing vacantly up at the trim little figure of the woman in the cart. She was past listening to anything that might be said.

"Shameless!" she commented, and drifted away again, unheeded. The adjustment of standards was bewildering; and one felt that here was another interrupter whose mental attitude was that of the drawing-room and not of the street corner.

The speaker made an end and asked for questions. They did not come with any rapidity. People who have done with the conventions of conduct are not anxious to know what is to become of the baby and the washing of the housewife who wants to cast a vote at a Parliamentary election. There was a pause; then the speaker declared the meeting closed. The meeting, however, declined to be closed. The crowd stood motionless, waiting for more; and they had it, when a real electioneer, wearing party colours and bristling with party commonplaces, stepped up to the fringe of the audience. He brought a breath of prosperous unreality with him, and when his objection, the usual apprehensive one about future women members of Parliament, was aptly answered from the lorry, the habituÉs of the place broke into noisy exultation.

"Nipped 'im in the bud, she has! Give it 'im agin, miss; give it 'im 'ot!" As it happened, she had to give it to him again and again, he being one of those hecklers who are never nipped in the bud, but think that if they ask the same question often enough they will catch the speaker unawares in the end. Unable to do this, after failing to accept or indeed to comprehend the answer that was patiently repeated four times, the ingenuous heckler wanted to know if the lady did not think he could sufficiently safeguard her interests in Parliament, and went away feeling sure he had the best of it, but wondering slightly why she laughed so immoderately at his parting shaft.

The wagon moved slowly off, and the meeting reluctantly broke up. The woman who had been speaking looked down upon her slowly dispersing audience, and tried to draw conclusions.

"One feels at home with these people," she said. "I wonder why it is?"

"Society has broken down their barriers, and they haven't learnt to set up new ones," suggested some one.

"'The saints and the sinners meet in the gaols,'" quoted our literary member, softly. "Suffragettes forced to be sinners, and sinners who are not given a chance to be saints—oh, it's easy to see why we two should be fellow-creatures!"

The saints and the sinners, slouching back to their dens, passed a similar verdict, if differently expressed, on the woman who had been speaking.

"Good old sport, that's what I call the old gal!" cried a young fellow, challenging criticism in a threatening tone. "Same 'ere," returned the pretty girl-sinner, or saint, not laughing this time, as she looked after the flapping flag that had brought a streak of colour, for one hour of her turbulent existence, into the black spot of the constituency.