The honourable member had hesitated as to whether he would give the vote to married women as well as to unmarried women, and, by his mode of dealing with the question, it would seem that he gave to vice what he denied to virtue. As long as a woman remains a spinster, it appears that she is to have the vote, but that, so soon as {246} she marries, she is to cease to be an elector; she is to lose her rights if she enters into the holy and honourable state of matrimony, and, if her husband dies, she is again to get the vote. When Napoleon was asked by Mme. de Stael who was the best woman in the State, he said: 'Madame, the woman who has the most children.'" It will be seen from the above extract that his opinion of the female sex was early Victorian, and so it remained to the end of his life. He was always a bitter opponent of woman suffrage; and when, in 1896, a petition for the Suffrage signed by 257,000 women from all parts of the United Kingdom was exhibited, "by kind permission of the Home Secretary," in Westminster Hall on a series of tables for the inspection of members, he immediately called the attention of the Speaker that afternoon in the House to the "unseemly display," and insisted upon its removal. He was indefatigable in his efforts to introduce economical Radical finance into every detail of government, always assuring his hearers that he was fighting for the principle of economy, and not merely against the mere absurdity of the existence of certain traditional offices and extravagances. In 1885 we find him requesting the Attorney-General to do his best to suppress the offices of Trainbearer, Pursebearer, and Clerk of the Petty Bag. He protested ably against the large sums spent upon the upkeep of the royal yacht, and upon the "objectionable practice" of asking the Commons to vote a sum of money for special packets for conveyance of distinguished persons to and from England. He protested against the nation being asked to pay the expenses incurred in the ceremony of making the present King (then Prince George of Wales) a Knight of the Garter. He was, in short, unceasingly vigilant wherever the spending of public money was concerned, and his remarks were usually practical and to the point. A quotation from a letter he wrote to the _Times_ in the same year on the Graduated Income Tax will be of interest, as peculiarly illustrative of his clear and simple {247} view of the rights of the poor man versus those of the rich man. "The income tax," he wrote, "when first put on by Mr. Pitt, was a graduated tax. No one then regarded this as a spoliation or confiscation. That a rich man should pay a higher percentage of taxation than a poor man is based upon what Mr. Stuart Mill terms 'equality of sacrifice.' It will, I presume, he admitted by all that the first call upon a man's income is that portion of it which is necessary for him and his family to eat, to be clothed, and to secure some sort of home. If a