ne of
Lancaster or any other body of corporate opinion. So that when in
September, 1913, representatives of the Turf (and no doubt of the
Trade Unions) went to the Home Secretary in reference to the burning
and bombing of racing stables, trainers' houses, Grand Stands and
the residences of racing potentates, and said "Look here! This has
GOT TO STOP," the Home Secretary and the Cabinet knew they were up
against no ordinary crisis. At the same time Sir Edward Carson, the
Marquis of Londonderry, the Duke of Abercorn, Mr. F.E. Smith and
nearly a third of the Colonels in the British Army of Ulster descent
were actively organizing armed resistance to any measure of Home
Rule; while Keltiberian Ireland was setting up the Irish Volunteers
to start a Home Rule insurrection. You can therefore imagine for
yourselves the mental irritability of members of the Liberal Cabinet
in the autumn of the sinister year 1913. I have been told that there
were days at the House of Commons during the Autumn Session of that
year when the leading ministers would just shut themselves up in
their Private Rooms and scream on end for a quarter of an hour....
Of course an exaggeration, a sorry jest.

In retrospect one feels almost sorry for them: the Great War must
have come almost as a relief. Not one of them was what you would
call a bad man. Some of them suffered over forcible feeding and the
Cat and Mouse Act as acutely as does the loving father or mother who
says to the recently spanked child, "You _know_, dear, it hurts _me_
almost as much as it hurts _you_." If one met them out at dinner
parties, or in an express train which they could not stop by pulling
the communication cord, and sympathized with their dilemma, they
would ask plaintively _what_ they could do. They could not yield to
violence and anarchy; yet they could not let women die in prison.

Of course the answer was this, but it was one they waved aside:
"Dissolve Parliament and go to the Country on the one question of
Votes for Women. If the Country returns a great majority favourable
to that concession, you must bring in a Bill for eliminating the sex
distinction in the suffrage. If on the other hand, the Country votes
against the reform, then you must leave it to the women to make a
male electorate change its mind. 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