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curiosity," and pure altruism, the desire to use our strength and our knowledge for the welfare of the herd, and specially its weaker members. Now, it is the emergence of these two desires which have marked the two stages of the Woman's Movement—I mean the demand for higher education, the demand for political freedom.
At this point I must make a somewhat shameful confession. For long, very long, I was half-hearted as to the Woman's Movement. I desired higher education, freedom to know, but not, as I explained before, the vote, not freedom to act and control. The reason was mainly pure selfishness, and—for this is always at the back of selfishness—a sluggish imagination. I myself intensely desired freedom to learn; I felt it to be the birthright of every human being. The thing was self-evident to me, I did not care to argue about it; it was a faith held with a passionate intensity beyond any reasoned conviction. Man had always most generously held out to me the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge; I not unnaturally placed him on a pedestal, and did homage to him as my Sacred Serpent.
But as to the vote, politics seemed to me, personally, heavy and sometimes rather dirty work, and I had always, on principle, preferred that a man-servant should bring in the coals. I am not ashamed of my lack of interest in politics. That deficiency still remains and must lie where it has always lain, on the knees of the gods. But that I failed to sympathise with a need I did not feel, of that I am truly ashamed. From that inertia and stupidity I was roused by the Militant Suffragists. I read of delicate and fastidious women who faced the intimate disgusts of prison life because they and their
