Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act 1913 was viewed as violating basic human rights, not only of the suffragettes but of other prisoners. The Act's nickname of "Cat and Mouse Act", referring to the way the government seemed to play with prisoners as a cat may with a captured mouse, underlined how the cruelty of repeated releases and re-imprisonments turned the suffragettes from targets of scorn to objects of sympathy. The Asquith government's implementation of the Act caused the militant WSPU and the suffragettes to perceive Asquith as the enemy — an enemy to be vanquished in what the organisation saw as an all-out war. A related
The Old Cat and the Young Mouse The fisherman and the little fish (V.3), however, a young carp makes almost the same appeal when it is caught - and with as little success. Two composers have adapted the fable to piano pieces in which the contrasting themes of hunter and hunted play against each other. Heitor Villa-Lobos' "O gato e o rato" dates from 1914 and is all that remains of a lost suite, "Fábulas características" (Typical Tales). He would have come across the fable in João Cardoso de Meneses e Sousa's Rio de Janeiro translation of 1886. Aaron Copland's "The Cat and the Mouse" was written