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:
“Perhaps, if looked at rightly and seriously, one of the most remarkable events in the world of women for many years was the dinner given on Tuesday last by the Editor of the Encyclopædia Britannica, in celebration of the part taken by women in the preparation of the 11th edition of that monument of learning. Among the women present as contributors or guests were the following:—The Mistress of Girton College and the Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, the Principal of Somerville College, Oxford, the Principal of Bedford College, London, and the heads of many other women’s colleges; H.M. Principal Lady Inspector of Factories (Miss A. M. Anderson, M.A.), the Lady Superintendent of the Post Office Savings Bank (Miss Maria Constance Smith, I.S.O.), Mrs. Fawcett, Mrs. W. K. Clifford, Lady Strachey, Mrs. Alec Tweedie, Mrs. Sophie Bryant, D.SC., Mrs. Hertha Ayrton, Mrs. Bedford Fenwick, Mrs. Wilfrid Meynell, Miss Emily Davies, LL.D., etc. Truly an imposing list of names, a standing testimony to the value of woman’s brain power in the work of the humanities and sciences.”