THE SUFFRAGETTES.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXIV, Issue 57, 31 October 1912, Page 5

THE SUFFRAGETTES.

(By Electric Telegraph.—Copyright.) (United Press Association.) London, October 29. Miss Evans was discharged in consideration of the fact that she had been under detention since her arrest, the Magistrate remarking that there was difficulty in dealing with people for whom punishment had no terror and servitude no shame. ANOTHER WOMAN RELEASED. (Received 9.40 a.m.) London, October 30. Helen Cragg. the suffragette, has been released, her health having being endangered by the hunger strike. Mr G. Bernard Shaw, in a letter which was published last month in the London newspapers, explains his views on the forcible feeding of suffragettes, who have been sentenced to imprisonment for crimes committed with the object of furthering the cause of women suffrage. He has always been an ardent supporter of the cause, and has bestowed his approval on the early stages _of the militant tactics of the suffragettes, but lie finds himself out of sympathy with the crimes of a more serious nature, though even in the cases of serious crimes, he is still sufficiently loyal to the suffragettes to place the blame on the Government. The exact cause for the statement of Mr Shaw’s views on forcible feeding is the circulation of a petition to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and the Chief Secretary for Ireland, asking that the sentences of five years’ imprisonment passed on Mrs Mary Leigli and Miss Gladys Evans h Q greatly reduced, and that they should he treated as nolitical offenders, and given the nrivilegs of prisoners p-ac-od in the first division, instead rf being treated as ordinary criminals placed in the second division. ' Mr JShaw’s letter is in ronlv to a request that he should sign this petition, and although it is addressed to Miss Mary Gawthorpe, who is circulating the petition, it is 'U>vio»clv intended for the general public for Mr Shaw is so intent on explaining his view that he entirely omits to say whether ho has signed the petition er not.

Restraint, net Uunishment. To set fire to a theatre is beyond all question a serious crime. If the suffragettes may commit arson with impunity because their motives are public motives, then they may assassinate, throw express trains off the hue. blow up the Houses of Parliament with dynamite, or, in short, do anything mischievous or murderous. This is clearly an impunitv which no community will stand; and women who are prepared to go to such lengths must clearly be restrained in some wav.

I do not say they should he punished. because I do not believe that anybody should be punished ; but restrained they certainly must be, just as necessarily as a tiger must lie restrained. Now, ■ the onlv method of restrain! at present available is imprisonment 1 think it extremely unfortunate that a prison should he a. place of punishment ; hut, even if the idea of punishment were given up. and a prison made as comfortable as a country house in a park, still, as long as people were confined there, or, indeed restrained or watched in any way, thov could always, by the expedient of voluntary starvation, force upon the community the alternative of either removing the restraint or seeing them die. . And this is the dilemma m which the Suffragists'have placed the’ Government. Long Sentence Prisoners. Hitherto the Government has stupidly and angrily attempted to escape from the dilemma by the illegal and abominable expedient of forcible iceding. it has been guilty of violence and torture in its prisons, and’it has tried to excuse itself by lying and insolence in Parliament. At that game it has been ignominously beaten, it has had to release the women and to confess its own impudent mendacity concerning the cruelty and danger of its illegal methods. . But this plan of finally releasing the prisoners after torturing them as much as the prison authorities dare is clearly only applicable to short sentences, with regard to which the Home Secretary can be assured that the unfortunate women have received, in the course of a few days’ forcible feeding a very full equivalent for the miseries of the unexpired portions of their sentences.

The moment the women go on to graver crimes this illogical compounding of a month’s imprisonment for a week’s torture is no longer possible. An attempt to give the Mountjoy prisoners an equivalent to forcible feeding for three and a half years’ penal servitude would probably end either in killing them or driving them mad. The result of that might bo that other suffragists might be goaded into doing something that would be punished, by a sentence o fpenal servitude for life. In that case what would the Government do ? To release a really dangerous criminal after n fortnight’s sto-mach-pumping would he ridiculous, and the released prisoner might quite possibly be lynched. To keep the prisoner would mean allowing her to starve herself to death.

Mariyrdom &y siarvauon. In such an extremity it seems to me that the prisoner’s right to commit suicide wouid have to he recognised. As long as the Govenuueut placed within the prisoner’s reach a sufficiency ot food, J do not see how it could bo neici accountable for the prisoner’s deatn any more than if she committed suicide in any other manner. And in the same way, if the Government is bound to release every prisoner who threatens to commit suicide by starvation, then all the criminals can compel a general gaol delivery and practically abolish all legal methods of dealing with crime. The lact that these methods are so bad that one would hardly regret such a result does not affect the argument, "pecanso any methods, however humane, could not be evaded in the same way. My conclusion, therefore, is that if the prisoners in Mountjoy are determined to commit suicide by starvation they must bo allowed to do so, and that the Government could not be held responsible for their deaths if it could convince the public that the prisoners had plenty of food within their reach.