If this last was his hope he was most grievously disappointed. Signs were constantly appearing to indicate that women would no longer be contented with the symbolic militancy involved in window breaking. For example, traces were found in the Home Secretary's office at Whitehall of an attempt at arson. On the doorstep of another Cabinet Minister similar traces were found. Had the Government acted upon these warnings, by giving women the vote, all the serious acts of militancy that have occurred since would have been averted. But like the heart of Pharaoh, the heart of the Government hardened, and militant acts followed one another in rapid succession. In July the W. S. P. U. issued a manifesto which set forth our intentions in that regard. The manifesto read in part as follows:
"The leaders of the Women's Social and Political Union have so often warned the Government that unless the vote were granted to women in response to the mild militancy of the past, a fiercer spirit of revolt would be awakened which it would be impossible to control. The Government have blindly disregarded the warning, and now they are reaping the harvest of their unstatesmanlike folly."
This was issued immediately after a visit paid by Mr. Asquith to Dublin. The occasion had been intended to be one of great pomp and circumstance, a huge popular demonstration in honour of the sponsor of Home Rule, but the Suffragettes turned it into the most lamentable fiasco imaginable. From the hour of Mr. Asquith's attempted secret departure from London until his return he lived and moved in momentary dread of Suffragettes. Every time he entered or left a railway carriage or a steamer he was confronted by women. Every time he rose to speak he was interrupted by women. Every public appearance he made was turned into a riot by women. As he left Dublin a woman threw a hatchet into his motor car, without, however, doing him any injury. As a final protest against his reception by Irishmen, the Theatre Royal was set on fire by two women. The theatre was practically empty at the time, the performance having been completed, and the damage done was comparatively small, yet the two women chiefly concerned, Mrs. Leigh and Miss Evans, were given the barbarous sentences of five years each in prison. These were the first women sentenced to penal servitude in the history of our movement. Of course they did not serve their sentences. On entering Mountjoy Prison they put in the usual claim for first division treatment, and this being refused, they immediately adopted the hunger strike. A number of Irish Suffragettes were in Mountjoy at this time for a protest made against the exclusion of women from the Home Rule Bill. They were in the first division, and they were almost on the eve of their release, but such is the indomitable spirit of militancy that these women entered upon a sympathetic hunger strike. They were released, but the Government forbade the release of Mrs. Leigh and Miss Evans, that is, they ordered the authorities to retain the women as long as they could, by forcible feeding, be kept alive. After a struggle which, for fierceness and cruelty, is almost unparalleled in our annals, the two women fought their way out.