Many outsiders preferred to look upon the women who faced this violence as being harder and less sensitive or as differing in some other way from the rest of their sex, but this was not by any means the case. Many of those who bore the worst brunt of the battle were women who had hitherto taken no part in politics, and had always led quiet and sheltered lives. Others had had to fight hard for their livelihood. Indeed they were of all ages and of all classes. Week by week greater numbers of them were joining the Union and coming forward to take a part in this work; but young and old, rich and poor, were treated in the same way. Meanwhile Cabinet Ministers either expressed surprised and horrified disapproval of their behaviour or sought instead to cover them with ridicule. Mr. Sidney Buxton, at his meeting at Poplar on October 12th cynically called to his women questioners, whom the stewards were maltreating, to "behave decorously like men." That old self-styled "friend" of Women's Suffrage, Mr. Haldane, addressing a meeting of women Liberals in Glasgow on January 8th, 1908, devoted the greater part of his speech to condemning the Suffragettes, saying that men did not like to be fought with "pin pricks," and that, though women might "wage war," he should advise them "not to do it with bodkins." At a meeting in his own constituency, shortly afterwards, he insisted that the women who interrupted him should be ejected by the police, and when finally, with bruised and aching limbs and torn and dishevelled clothing, they had all been thrown out of the hall, he treated the whole matter as a joke saying that he was "bachelor-proof against these belles." Mr. Asquith, like the Prime Minister, was forced to reply to a question put to him in his own Scotch constituency, at Tayport, on October 29th. There he said that, if the vote were granted to women it would do "more harm than good," and that in any case, the House of Commons is not elected on a basis of Universal Suffrage, for "children are not represented there." At several meetings, notably those of Mr. Asquith at Nuneaton on November 16th, and of Mr. Winston Churchill in the historic Free Trade Hall, the stewards behaved with so much brutality that the police intervened to protect the women.