Letters of Note, People’s Thoughts

Emily Davison — Fri, 11 Oct 1912 00:01:46 +0000

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.

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

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Letters of Note, People’s Thoughts