And meantime if men and women, to
enforce some principle, rioted and were sent to prison for it, and
then started to abstain from food and drink, why they must please
themselves and die if they wanted to."
But this was just what the Liberal Ministry of those days would not
do; at all costs they must stick to office, emoluments, patronage,
the bestowal of honours, and the control of foreign policy. They
clung to power, in fact, at all costs; even inconsistency with the
bedrock principle of Liberalism: no Taxation without Representation.
It was decided in the innermost arcana of the Home Office that an
example should be made of Vivie. They had evidently in her got hold
of something far more dangerous than a Pankhurst or a Pethick
Lawrence, a Constance Lytton or an Emily Davison. The very probable
story--though the Benchers were loth to take it up--that she had
actually in man's garb passed for the Bar and pleaded successfully
before juries, appalled some of the lawyer-ministers by its
revolutionary audacity. They might not be able to punish her on that
count or on several others of the misdemeanours imputed to her; but
they had got her, for sure, on Arson; and on the arson not of
suburban churches, which occurred sometimes at Peckham or in the
suburbs of Birmingham and made people laugh a little in the trains
coming up to town and say there were far too many churches, seemed
to them; _but_ the burning down of racing establishments.
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