In the meanwhile in some other countries where, except in the United States, it was of much more recent growth, the woman's suffrage movement has achieved success, with no great expenditure of energy. It has been introduced into several American States and Territories. It is established throughout Australasia. It is also established in Norway. In Finland women may not only vote, but also sit in Parliament.
It was in these conditions that the Women's Social and Political Union was formed in London. It was not an offshoot from any existing woman's suffrage society, but represented a crystallization of new elements. For the most part, even its leaders had not previously taken any active part in the movement for woman's suffrage. The suffrage movement had need of exactly such an infusion of fresh and ardent blood; so that the new society was warmly welcomed, and met with immediate success, finding recruits alike among the rich and the poor. Its unconventional methods, its eager and militant spirit, were felt to supply a lacking element, and the first picturesque and dashing exploits of the Union were on the whole well received. The obvious sincerity and earnestness of these very fresh recruits covered the rashness of their new and rather ignorant enthusiasm.
But a hasty excess of ardour only befits a first uncalculated outburst of youthfulness. It is quite another matter when it is deliberately hardened into a rigid routine, and becomes an organized method of creating disorder for the purpose of advertising a grievance in season and out of season. Since, moreover, the attack was directed chiefly against politicians, precisely that class of the community most inclined to be favourable to woman's suffrage, the wrong-headedness of the movement becomes as striking as its offensiveness.
The effect on the early friends of the new movement was inevitable. Some, who had hailed it with enthusiasm and proclaimed its pioneers as new Joans of Arc, changed their tone to expostulation and protest, and finally relapsed into silence. Other friends of the movement, even among its former leaders, were less silent. They have revealed to the world, too unkindly, some of the influences which slowly corrupt such a movement from the inside when it hardens into sectarianism: the narrowing of aim, the increase of conventionality, the jealousy of rivals, the tendency to morbid emotionalism.