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. _That_ was
Bolshevism, indeed, they would have said, had they been able to
project their minds five years ahead. Being only in 1913 they called
Vivie by the enfeebled term of Anarchist, the word applied by
_Punch_ to Mr. John Burns in 1888 for wishing to address the Public
in Trafalgar Square.

So it was arranged that Vivie's trial should take place in October
at the Old Bailey and that a judge should try her who was quite
certain he had never stayed at a Warren Hotel; who would be careful
to keep great names out of court; and restrain counsel from dragging
anything in to the simple and provable charge of arson which might
give Miss Warren a chance to say something those beastly newspapers
would get hold of.

I am not going to give you the full story of Vivie's trial. I have
got so much else to say about her, before I can leave her in a quiet
backwater of middle age, that this must be a story which has gaps to
be filled up by the reader's imagination. You can, besides, read for
yourself elsewhere--for this is a thinly veiled chronicle of real
events--how she was charged, and how the magistrate refused bail
though it was offered in large amounts by R