As on the eve of a General Election it might be awkward if they made many arrests of women--perchance Liberal women--on their way to the House to present a petition or escort a deputation, the police should be instructed instead to repel the Suffragists by force, to give them a taste of that "frightfulness" which became afterwards so familiar a weapon in the Prussian armoury.

Some said also that the Government looked to the crowd which was allowed to form unchecked on the pavements, the crowd of rough men and boys--costers from Lambeth, longshore men from the barges on the unembanked Westminster riverside, errand boys, soldiers, sailors, clerks returning home, warehousemen, the tag-rag and bob-tail generally of London when a row is brewing--looked to this crowd to catch fire from the brutality of the police (uniformed and in plain clothes) and really give the women clamouring for the Vote "what for"; teach them a lesson as to what the roused male can do when the female passes the limits of domestic license.

A few deaths might result (and did), and many injuries, but the treatment they received would make such an impression on Mrs.
Pankhurst's followers that they would at last realize the futility of measuring their puny force against the muscle of man.

Force, as the Premier had just said, must be the decisive factor.
But unfortunately for these calculations the large male crowd took quite a different line.

The day had gone by when men and boys were wont to cry to some expounding Suffragette: "Go home and mind yer biby." Dimly these toilers and moilers, these loafers and wasters now understood that women of a courage rarely matched in man were fighting for the cause of all ill-governed, mal-administered, swindled, exploited people of either sex.