Polling took place on November 28th, and when the votes were counted, it was found that the Liberal poll as recorded at the General Election had been reduced by 540. The figures were:-- Arthur Sherwell (L.) 5,762 T. R. Williams (Lab.) 5,422 J. Foster Fraser (U.) 4,844 _____ Liberal Majority. 340 At the General Election the figures had been:-- Sir J. T. Woodhouse (Lib.) 6,302 T. R. Williams (Lab.) 5,813 J. Foster Fraser (U.) 4,391 _____ Liberal Majority 489 Meanwhile the Government had been pushing on with its Bill for the abolition of plural voting, to which the Women's Social and Political Union had persistently claimed that a clause providing for the registration of qualified women voters should be added. When the Bill reached the Report stage on November 26th, Lord Robert Cecil moved and Mr. Keir Hardie seconded and Mr. Balfour supported an amendment to postpone the operation of the Bill until after the next General Election, unless in the meantime the franchise had been given to women on the same terms as men. The object was, of course, to call attention to the need of Votes for Women, and this somewhat round-about way had been adopted because it was ruled out of order to simply suggest that votes for Women should be enacted as a part of the Plural Voting Bill. The amendment was opposed by the Government, and defeated by 278 votes to 50. Our Manchester Members were now anxious to organise a protest on their own account and it was agreed that they should have their way. Accordingly, on December 13th, a valiant little army of some twenty or thirty North Country women came down to London and proceeded straight to Parliament Square, carrying a small wooden packing case which they set down in the gutter opposite the stranger's entrance. The box was mounted by Mrs. Jennie Baines of Stockport, a fragile little woman, who had begun her strenuous life as a Birmingham child home-worker, rising early in the morning in order to help her mother to stitch hooks and eyes on to cards before going to school, snatching a few moments for the same task in the dinner hour and on returning home in the evening, working far into the night. In her girlhood she had been a Salvation Army "Captain." Later she had married a journeyman bootmaker, and though, in addition to caring for her home and her children, she had been forced to toil in the factory, in order to keep the home together, she had still managed to work as a Police Court Missionary and Temperance and Social reformer.