Vivie said in one of the many speeches that got her into
trouble--"Bridge-players, first and foremost, golf-players when they
couldn't play bridge, or speculators on the Stock Exchange,
champagne drinkers; and prone to eat at their Lucullus banquets,
public and private, till they sometimes fainted with indigestion."

My! But she was bitter in her Hyde Park speeches and at her Albert
Hall meetings against this band of mock-liberals who had seized the
impulse of the country towards reform which had grown up under the
Chamberlain era to instal themselves in power with the financial
backing of great Americo-German-Jewish internationalists, who in
those early years of the Twentieth century were ready to stake their
dollars on the Free Trade British Empire if they might guide its
policy.

[Very likely if they had obtained the complete guidance they sought
for they might have staved off this ruinous war by telling Germany
bluntly she must keep her hands off France and Belgium; they might
also have seen to it that the War Office _was_ reformed and the
British army ready to fulfil Lord Haldane's promises; for there is
no doubt they had ability even if they despised the instruments they
worked with.]

But as I say, Vivie was a bitter and most effective speaker. She
inflamed to action many a warm-hearted person like myself, like
Rossiter (who got into trouble--though it was hushed up--in
1910-1911 for slapping the face of a Secretary of State who spoke
slightingly of the women Suffragists and their motives). Yet I seem
to be stranded now, with a few others, in my pre-war enthusiasm over
the woman's cause, or, later, my horror at the German treatment of
Belgium.

Where are the snows of yester-year; where is the animosity which in
the years between the burking of the Conciliation Bill and the
spring of 1914 grew up between the disinterested Reformers who
wanted Woman enfranchised and the Liberal ministers who fought so
doggedly, so unscrupulously, against such a rational completion of
representative government? The other day I glanced at a newspaper
and saw that Sir Michael and Lady Rossiter had been dining at the
Ritz with the Grandcourts, Princess Belasco, Sir Abel Batterby, the
great Police Surgeon, knighted for his skill and discretion in
forcible feeding, and the George Bounderbys (G.B. was the venomous
Private Secretary of a former Chancellor of the Exchequer and put
him up to most of his anti-suffrage dodges); and meet