A TRUCE to work. Even adversity has its sweets. After tasks should come whatever pleases best, the toiler has earned a play-hour. A lover of pageant, I will now describe what to me is one of the interesting sights in London, namely a reception at the Foreign Office. The invitations are issued “by His Majesty and His Ministers,” for ten-thirty, but before ten o’clock a line of carriages is slowly wending its way to Whitehall, through Downing Street, into the courtyard of the Foreign Office.

It is the King’s Birthday, Parliament has risen, all the men of note in the country are dining at official dinners. They have all donned their best uniforms, Court dress, decorations, and ribbons, and presently are making their way up the gaily decorated staircase.

One must own to a feeling of disappointment on driving up, for the entrance door is meagre and indifferent, and the downstairs cloak-rooms are not imposing. Nevertheless, the dividing staircase once reached, all is changed. At its foot is the famous marble statue of the late Lord Salisbury by Herbert Hampton, the cast for which I had gazed on so often when my own bust was being modelled. The well is not so large as in Stafford House, nor so imposing as in Dorchester House, so the spectators do not stand all round, but on one side only; besides, the aspect is somewhat contracted. Still, half-way up the Foreign Minister, with several officials and a sprinkling of ladies, stands and receives. Those who have the entrée pass up the stairs on his left hand; those without it pass up on his right.

Masses of flowers festoon the marble balustrade; their scent is heavy in the air. What a strange crowd it is! Some of the most renowned men and women in Europe are present. Gorgeous ladies in magnificent gowns, with sparkling tiaras, are escorted by gentlemen ablaze with stars and orders. Then come a humble little Labour Member in a blue serge coat, and his wife in an ill-fitting blouse. At the top of the stairs the crowd disperses to the Great Hall, where the one and only picture represents William III. Beyond this is the room used in the last Administration for Cabinet meetings—for this particular reception took place in 1907—and where also Sir Edward Grey, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, had just given his full-dress dinner. Here refreshments were served, and here also the band of the Grenadier Guards played during the evening.

Among the visitors were Ambassadors from foreign States, besides diplomats attached to the various Embassies, with their wives, Ministers and Ladies of the Legations, Consuls and Consuls-General of foreign countries, heads of Departments, and Chiefs of Government Offices; representatives of the Army, Navy, Church, Art, Literature, Drama, etc.

The decorations worn by the men certainly improve their appearance and add to the brilliancy of the scene, but stars own sharp, angular points, which have a way of scratching bare arms, as the writer knows to her cost.

About eleven o’clock the strains of “God Save the King” were heard, and shortly afterwards the Royal Procession was formed, and wended its way through all the galleries, until it reached the room where supper was arranged. Young men in official uniform preceded the procession, to clear the way. Then followed the Prime Minister, with the Princess of Wales (now Queen Mary), who has the gift of acquiring greater dignity of manner as years roll on.

The Prince of Wales (now King George V.) came next, and, with that extraordinary genial gift of recognition, apparently inherited from his father, he stopped as he passed through the suite of rooms to shake hands with the people he knew.

All the Ministers and their wives, the Duke of Norfolk, and a host of other officials followed in his wake. It is the custom for the gentlemen to bow low and the ladies to curtsey as the procession passes.

By this time there was barely breathing room, for all the official diners had arrived, and most of the three thousand invitations issued found a representative in that gay throng. Supper over, the Royal Procession returned through the State Galleries, and, descending the staircase, went home shortly after midnight.

Well, well! to think how many people declare they “would not thank you for such a pretty sight; would rather sit at home with their book, or smoke at their club; anything rather than see a fashionable gathering, and be jostled by diplomats and peers.”

“OPENING OF PARLIAMENT.
An Impression of the Peers.
(By a Woman Commoner.)”

Thus my little article was headed in the front page of The Pall Mall Gazette, 1902.

A tea-party at the House of Commons is another London experience that to me is always rather amusing. For this one drives to St. Stephen’s Porch, and, passing up a wide stairway flanked here and there by ponderous-looking policemen, is accosted at the top of the stairs by another magnificent guardian of the law, who demands one’s business.

“Tea with Dr. Farquharson,” was my humble reply on one occasion, whereupon the functionary bowed graciously, and waved me through the glass doors that led to the central hall.

There is always a hubbub in that particular lobby; at least, I have never been there when it has not been full of men discussing political affairs. (Or dare we call it gossiping?) Between four and five o’clock a small sprinkling of ladies, who have been invited to tea within the sacred precincts, are dotted here and there. Members are generally very good at meeting their guests, and on the alert, at the appointed place and time. It is well this is so, for it would be an awful trial for a lone woman to stand and wait there long.

Having collected his chickens, the evergreen Member for Aberdeen led us along the passage opposite our entrance to the Terrace. The way on the left leads to the House of Commons, that on the right to the House of Lords. It is all very imposing, as far as the end of the passage, but having reached that one stumbles down a stone-flagged stairway which would hardly do credit as the ordinary back-stairs of a private London house, and would certainly be a poor specimen of the back-stairs of a country mansion. Foreigners and Americans must be rather surprised at the cellar-like and tortuous means by which they are led to the famous river view; for back regions, consisting of kitchens, store-rooms, pantries, and other like places, have to be passed by the dainty ladies who trip their way to the Terrace overlooking the Thames.

Having emerged from semi-darkness to the light, all is changed. From the Terrace there is a magnificent view of St. Thomas’s Hospital opposite, and the barges and river craft plying between.

Neat maids in black dresses and white caps and aprons serve the Commons. It is a charming place; still, although shaded from the sun, wind on the Terrace is not unknown, and the cloths on the little tables have to be carefully pegged down to keep them in their places. The entertainment, however pleasant, is not exactly what one would call smart. Plain white cups and brown earthenware teapots, hunks of cake on plates, or strawberries and cream, form the fare. There are none of those dainty little trays and mats, and pretty crockery, to which one is accustomed at ladies’ clubs or in Bond Street tea-rooms.

At one end of the Terrace, nearest the Bridge, is the Speaker’s House, and that part of the walk is reserved for Members alone. On a hot summer afternoon twenty, thirty, or forty men may be seen there settling important business, or enjoying tea and cigarettes. Then comes the portion set aside for Members with guests, and there the gaiety of the dresses—for every woman puts on her best to go to tea at the House of Commons—is delightful, but mingled with the smart company are some queer folk. Members are always being asked to entertain their constituents, and some of the political ladies from the provinces must be rather a trial to their representatives at Westminster.

We were a funny little party that afternoon. Miss Braddon (Mrs. Maxwell) sat at the end of the table, then came Sir Gilbert Parker, myself, Mr. and Mrs. (now Sir Henry and Lady) W. H. Lucy, Sir William Wedderburn, and Mrs. John Murray.

Since the Radical majority in 1906 the Terrace has become a very different place. Smart ladies and pretty frocks, well-set-up and well-groomed men, are not predominant; for Labour Members wear labour clothes, and smoke pipes, while their families and friends look ill at ease below those glorious towers of Westminster.

A few days after that House of Commons tea with Dr. Farquharson I chanced to have tea at the House of Lords with Viscount Templetown. In this case, one drives up to the Peers’ Entrance, which is rather farther from Parliament Street, and alights beneath the fine portico, where officials in gorgeous uniform enquire one’s business, until the kindly peer, who is waiting in the hall, steps forward to claim his guest.

Passing, as on my visit to the House of Commons, through sundry cheerless passages and more horrible stone staircases, we stepped out upon the Terrace, this time at the end furthest from the Speaker’s House. The only difference in the arrangements is that at the Lords’ teas, waitresses are superseded by waiters wearing gorgeous blue ribbons and gold badges, so grand, indeed, that an American is said to have innocently asked if that was the Order of the Garter.

“Yes, my lud,” “No, my lud,” is the answer to every question. The tea is just the same, the fare is just as frugal, the cups and tray just as simple as for the House of Commons, but on every chair is painted “House of Lords.” What would not an American give to possess one of those chairs, iron-clamped and wooden-rimmed though they be?

The less said about the Ladies’ Gallery the better. I have never gone there without a feeling of disgust. One might as well be shut up in a bathing-machine, so foul is the air; or behind the screen of a cathedral, so little can one see; or in a separate room, so little can one hear. For many months in 1910 women were forbidden even this gruesome chamber as a punishment for militant disturbances. When the rule of banishment was rescinded only relations of members were admitted. Thus some curious relationships were invented. A story runs that someone asked a prominent Irishman if he would pass a lady in as his cousin.

“Certainly,” he replied—but when he saw her, she came from South Africa, and was black, and so he cooled off.

“But the lady is official, and must get in.”

“All right, I’ll manage it,” replied the genial member, so off he went to a fellow-Nationalist.

“I say, there is an official’s wife from South Africa wants a seat. Will you pass her in as your cousin?”

“By all means,” replied his colleague.

Accordingly, the black lady took her seat complacently, and everyone wondered whose “cousin” she was.

Let me, “in half joke and whole earnest,” as the Irish say, give an instance of myself as an ordinary woman with certain ideas on politics, and show how one incident changed my mind on the Tariff. Let us call the little tale “The Story of a Fur Coat”—only a little story about my very own fur coat, a Conservative garment which nearly became Socialistic atoms.

In 1905 I was in Mexico. I had crossed the Atlantic in the warmth of summer, had travelled in tropical heat beneath banana trees in the South, and was to return to England in time for Christmas Day. I waited in Mexico City until the last minute, because I wanted to see General Diaz elected President for the seventh time. Then I remembered my big sledging coat was in London, and three thousand miles of the Atlantic had to be crossed in mid-winter, even after traversing as many more miles by land to reach New York.

I wired for the coat to meet me in New York.

Seven feet of snow lay piled along the sides of the streets of that city when I arrived, and chunks of ice floated down the Hudson, icicles hung from the sky-scrapers; everyone shivered out of doors, and baked, or rather stewed, inside the houses.

“Where is my fur coat?” I asked.

“It has not arrived,” was the answer.

Distressed and surprised, I went off the next day to the Steamship Office to demand the coat. From White Star to Cunard, from Cunard to White Star, backwards and forwards I trudged. At last a package securely sewn up and sealed was found. Was that it?

Really I could not say, as I had never seen the parcel before; but, as my name was on it, I presumed it was. Would the clerk kindly look inside and see if it was a blue cloth coat with a fur lining and sable collar?

The clerk regretted, but he dared not open it, and suggested my filling in a sheet of paper.

“Certainly, I would fill in anything to get my coat.”

So I began. They have a way in America of asking the most irrelevant questions. Your age?—Parents?—Probable length of sojourn?—What illnesses have you had?—If you are a cripple?—What languages you speak?—and generally end up by enquiring of first-class passengers if they have ever been in prison.

I answered reams of such-like questions, as far as I can remember; swore to all sorts of queer things, and against “Value” put forty or fifty pounds, which was what the coat had originally cost.

The clerk took the paper, read it slowly through, appeared to juggle with figures, and then said calmly:

“The duty will be twenty-three pounds!” ($115.)

“The what?” I exclaimed.

“The duty——”

“What duty? It is a very old coat; it has been in Iceland, Lapland, Russia, and other countries with me, and it is not for sale. It is my own coat.”

“I quite understand all that,” he replied, “but you said its value was forty or fifty pounds, and we charge sixty per cent on the value.”

I nearly had a fit. I was sailing next day; I had no twenty-three pounds in cash to pay with, and I absolutely declined to disburse anything.

He simply refused to disgorge. Deadlock.

Fuming and fretting, I left the office. Every influential friend I had was appealed to in the next few hours, I maintaining stoutly that every paper in America should hear of the injustice to my “old clo’,” if I had to cross the Atlantic without it; and if I died from cold, my death would be laid at the door of the American custom-house officials.

Finally, the affair was arranged. At seven o’clock next morning a friend fetched me in that rare commodity—in New York—a cab, and we drove those weary miles to the docks. My luggage was on the vehicle, my ticket in my hand. It was not the same dock as I was sailing from at ten o’clock. More palaver, more signing of documents, more swearing to the identity of the coat, more showing of frayed edges, to prove the coveted garment was not new; and the precious thing was at last handed over. An official helped me into it. Another official mounted on the box of the cab and drove with me to the next dock; he actually conveyed me—and the coat—“in bond” to my ship. He saw me up the gangway, and then—but apparently not till then—did he believe I was not going to sell the coat, and cheat the United States of a sixty per cent duty.

Up to that time I had been somewhat large in my views, somewhat of a Free Trader; but after that I realised how impossible it was for England to stand out practically alone against all the other protected countries, and that if Free Trade was right, Free Trade must be universal or not at all. Why should we be the only people to be philanthropic?

When they wanted to take my fur coat from me I also realised I was not really a Socialist. I did not wish to share it with anyone; and when they wanted to charge me for my own wares, I felt the injustice of England allowing tens and tens of thousands of new foreign clothes to enter our ports unchallenged, while America and other countries charge half the value of the goods received.

From that moment I believed in Protection, and bade adieu to Free-Trade notions and Socialistic dreams.

We do the giving, while others do the taking, and the odds work against ourselves.

As we can’t make the world Free Traders, let us enjoy Protection, like the rest of the world. Conscription, more practical—and especially technical—education, and the revival of apprenticeships, would do more good to England than all the Socialistic tearing to pieces of manners and customs, strikes, disorganisation, and all the rest of it.

Cabinet Ministers, with their five thousand a year, and Members of Parliament, with their four hundred pounds, can afford to go on keeping the pot of discontent boiling—its very seething is what keeps them in office. Paid agitators are ruining the land.

“From gay to grave” this chapter is headed. Surely no misnomer, for to pass from teacups on the Terrace of Lords’ and Commons’ Houses, where women chat and smile, and show off their pretty frocks, to the atmosphere of solid learning diffused by the Encyclopædia Britannica, its huge staff, its editor, its hundreds of workers, this is a weighty and serious enough ending.

The Encyclopædia Britannica celebrated its eleventh birthday—I mean edition—on the 13th December, 1910; and all the great papers (and the greater Dailies “include the lesser”) took notice of the really noteworthy banquet.

Four dinners had been already given by Mr. Hugh Chisholm, the editor, to his masculine contributors, but the feminine element being less numerous, it was thought inadvisable to distribute the women as scanty plums in four large dough puddings. Therefore the fifth and last of the series of Encyclopædia dinners given at the Savoy Hotel was dedicated to celebrating the share taken by women in the colossal work. We sat down two hundred and fifty, and no more representative attendance of light and learning was ever brought together. It was a triumph for both sexes. A splendid gathering of men came to do those women workers honour.

The Times said:

Twelve hundred contributors from all over the world. Among whom only twenty-seven were women. Is it surprising that I was proud to be numbered among those lucky few, and to have been one of the four asked to speak at that great gathering?

The Morning Post, after giving the names of the guests present, added that the wide range of feminine activity, shown in the lives and work of those ladies present, proved that into the last four decades women had compressed the work of four centuries. That the interests, work, and present place in the social scheme of women were entirely on a level with that of men, this being the strongest testimony of the enormous advance in civilisation made by all the English-speaking peoples in the past forty years.

Hurrah! All honour to women! Admiring my sex as I do, here let me make my boast of them, and give a little list of the leading women contributors that was kindly furnished me by Miss Janet Hogarth8 (head of the female staff of the Encyclopædia Britannica). If some are omitted, I am sorry; for we should make the most of our few chances of letting the blind, deaf outer world see and hear what women are doing and have lately done.

Education.—Mrs. Henry Sidgwick.

Scholarship.—Mrs. Wilde (Miss A. M. Clay), Mrs. Alison Phillips, Miss B. Philpotts.

Science.—Lady Huggins, Miss A. L. Smith, the late Miss Agnes Clarke, and the late Miss Mary Bateson.

Travel.—Lady Lugard, Mrs. Alec Tweedie, Miss Gertrude Bell.

Sociology.—Miss A. Anderson.

Literature.—Mrs. Meynell, Miss Jessie Weston, Miss Margaret Bryant, Miss A. Zimmern.

Church History.—Miss A. Panes, Mrs. O’Neill.

Music.—Miss Schlesinger.

Medicine.—Mrs. Hennessy and the late Miss Fisher.

Philosophy.—Lady Welby.

Having myself, as usual, refused to speak, I was kindly reproached by Mr. Chisholm for declining, and told “to be sure to be amusing.”

But stop a moment! Punch was so delightful in his next issue, that it is to be hoped Toby will not yap at me for lifting the morsel wholesale.

“THE END OF WOMAN

“[Miss Fluffy Frou-Frou’s reply to Miss Janet Hogarth, who, at a recent Encyclopædia-Contributors’ Dinner, said the best answer she had ever heard to the question, ‘What are women put into this world for?’ was, ‘To keep the men’s heads straight.’]

It seems that in the first edition of the Encyclopædia, published in 1798, the editor defined woman as “the female of man. See Homo.” Finally, Miss Hogarth, who began by telling what women had done for the Encyclopædia Britannica, ended by saying what it had given them, viz. the opportunity, hitherto unequalled, of showing what they could do to help learning, the chance to demonstrate their rightful place in the learned world.

Afterwards Mrs. Fawcett, in an excellent speech, said that the wife of a working-man (if she did her duty) was the hardest-worked creature on the face of the globe. Pointing to the successes achieved by women in various directions, she recalled the remark of a famous Cambridge coach who reproached his idle students, asking how they would like to be beaten by a woman. One replied, “I should much prefer it, sir, to being beaten by a man.”

To end up the notices of this memorable dinner, ever-delightful Punch helps one to leave off with a smile. This is a little scrap stolen—be quiet, Toby!—from a column of quips and cranks honouring our gathering: