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.