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 Town Mouse and the Country Mouse second of his satires. This is more in accord with Horace's description of it as "an old wives' tale" but Wyatt's retelling otherwise echoes Henryson's: an impoverished country mouse visits her sister in town but is caught by the cat. In the second half of the poem (lines 70–112) Wyatt addresses his interlocutor John Poynz on the vanity of human wishes. Horace, on the other hand, had discussed his own theme at great length before closing on the story. By contrast, the adaptation in La Fontaine's Fables, "Le rat de ville et le rat des champs" (I.9), is simply told.