October 11, 1912 To the Editor of The Daily Citizen, “Letters of Note,
People’s Thoughts”
[Opinions differing from our own will often find expression in this column. All
communications should be short. They should be written on one side of the paper only,
and addressed to “The Daily Citizen,’ Manchester.}
“Mr. Hall Caine and Force”
Another mystery about Emily Davison’s journalistic career as a letter-to-the-editor-
writer is how she managed to get a copy of the then-new Daily Citizen of Manchester,
England. Having gotten and read the first issue of the journal in Longhorsley, she
responded to the opinions of Mr. Hall Caine (Thomas Henry Hall Caine), a popular
writer of romances and novels many of which were produced as plays in the
Edwardian era. Hall Caine, as he was known, had begun his career as secretary to the
Pre-Raphaelite painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti; it is no surprise, then, that he
had socialist leanings, although his only foray into politics was in the governance of
the Isle of Man where he lived in Greeba Castle. Hall Caine’s work frequently addressed
social and political issues, as well as religion. He was a general supporter of the
woman suffrage movement, although not of militancy. His 1908 novel, The White
Prophet, explored the problems of colonial rule in Egypt and attempted a synthesis of
major religions; the novel was dramatized in the same year. In 1913 he published The
Woman Thou Gavest Me, a novel which explored the two taboo subjects of divorce
laws and illegitimacy. It was a notorious best-seller; five hundred thousand copies
had been bought by the end of the year of its publication. Its success is said to have
revitalized Caine’s reputation.
In her response to Caine’s column, Davison addresses Caine’s interest in
religion and in social justice through the argument that militant force does
not exist by itself, but is a measured, warranted response to the way that suffragists
have been ignored and brutalized. She invokes the Bible in constructing her argument,
citing the Decalogue and Jesus’s summation of the law into two commandments.
Finally she claims the moral right of the suffrage movement based on a law more fundamental
than man’s law, or than natural law, which she implies is a law of the jungle. She links
the campaign for woman suffrage to the Christian concept of all humans created in the
image of God, and born free by virtue of that tie to divinity.
Sir,--The columns of your first issue, to which I heartily wish all success, are
adorned by a clever article from the pen of Mr. Hall Caine, entitled ‘The Use of
Force in Politics,’ in which the writer deprecates the use of force in the Woman
and Labour Movement to-day, which, with your permission, I should be glad to
criticise.
What Mr. Hall Caine fails to recognize apparently, is, that what he
terms ‘force’ is merely the determination of a suppressed part of the people to
find direct expression for their views. The trend of modern civilization is to find
the means of self-expressing, and the hitherto least articulate parts of the
community are now doing it with no uncertain voice. But people must express
themselves in different ways, at different times and under different
circumstances. The methods may vary from the use of the tongue and the pen,
to that of the hammer, fire, or the hatchet.
For example a soft persuasive tongue is of little avail when you are
confronted by one whose passions are roused, and who does not speak your
tongue. In deprecating the use of force by women, Mr. Hall Caine, who is by his
own confession no adequate judge of the situation, owing to this long
absence ‘from the world of British politics,’ apparently does not grasp one or two
important points:--
(a) Force was first used against the women, so that unless they were
willing to use a certain amount of force, they had to submit to brute force. It was
four years before any window-smashing took place.
(b) Women had tried for years the language of reason and logic, until
they realized that nothing would avail them but the language of rebellion.
(c) That behind all this so-called use of brute force is intense moral force,
otherwise it would fail. When Mr. Hall Caine himself says of the Italian
Revolution ‘not physical force but moral force, achieved the victory, and so it has
been, I think, all the world over, and all the ages through,’ he does not see how
plainly he is stating our case today.
Mr. Hall Caine condemns us for breaking the law, because, he argues, it
is not man made law but nature’s law. So it may be, but does that make it a right
law. [sic] The original basis of all law was brute force, or the law of the stronger,
and if it had been accepted as right, we should still have been in our sins, and
there would have been no Christianity, no freeing of the slaves, no inculcation of
the Gospel of Labour, no possibility of evolution.
Thus when Mr. Hall Caine argues that the suffragist who breaks a
window, or one who sets fire to a theatre, is breaking two very important points of
the Decalogue, he forgets that there are two divisions of the Decalogue: the law
as regards God, and the law as regards man.
The first division which includes the four first commandments is summed
up by the Master Himself [Jesus] in the words: ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with
all they heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength,’ while the latter six
are comprised in: ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself,’ and of these two
divisions the former is the greater.
When suffragists are treating their neighbours in a way that they are
perfectly willing to be treated themselves, they are obeying the higher law, and
asserting the divinity which is in man and woman, which forbids them to allow
their heavenly and earthly citizenship to be questioned and insulted, which leads
them to struggle with all their power for the true liberty, the one inestimable boon,
besides which all else is as dross, for the right to claim for all their daughters and
their sons that which St. Paul once proudly and dignifiedly referred to in the
words: ‘But I was born free!’
Emily Wilding Davison
Longhorsley, Northumberland