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 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.