the 21st, the Lord Mayor occupying the chair. The other speakers were Dr. Stewart, Rev. W. F. Stevenson, Mr. Eason, Rev. Mr. Carroll, Alderman Durdin, and Father O'Malley. The three clergymen named are respectively Presbyterian, Episcopalian and Catholic."

This was the last time on which it could be said there was no Committee in Dublin. In Mrs. Haslam the Women's Suffrage cause had by this time found a worker full of perseverance and buoyant energy. Mrs. Haslam (Anna Maria Fisher) added another to the many workers whom the Society of Friends, with its solid and equal education for boys and girls, had furnished to the movement. As a girl of seventeen she had helped, in the days of the Irish famine, in the soupkitchens at Youghall. At twenty she had sat with Elihu Burritt at a public meeting, where she read a report of the "Olive Leaf Circle," one of the first branches started in Ireland of a small association which originated in the Society of Friends, rather more than fifty years ago, for interesting young people in the principles of peace. Coming as a young married woman to live in Dublin, she was fully alive to the questions of higher education and employment for women, then finding expression in the foundation of the Queen's Institute (in Molesworth St.) and the Alexandra College. Mrs. Haslam's name first appeared in Women's Suffrage interests on the petition of 1866. This meeting now opened out opportunity for an organized cohesion of friends of the movement, and she took up the work as Honorary Secretary of the Committee in Dublin, of which she is Honorary Secretary to this day.1

1 For portrait of Mrs. Haslam, see p. 216.

Miss Isabella M. S. Tod first became interested in the movement through the meeting of the Social Science Association at Belfast in 1867. Hitherto her circle had presented no open door for the studious young woman, careful and sympathetic companion to a much-loved and liberal-minded mother, from whom she inherited the longing that she felt from her youth up to improve the lot of women. Urged on by this new motive, she studied diligently many things not usual with the girls of her day-thus, when the Social Science Congress came to her city, she was ready to be drawn into active connection. with the questions of education for women, and married women's property laws, which were prominent subjects of discussion that year. By an easy, indeed a necessary, transition she very soon entered the Suffrage movement, the ideas of which came as a revelation to her. Both in writing and speaking she had the charm of an easy flow of well-chosen words, springing from the stores of a cultured and deeply religious mind, combined with some of the fighting temperament of her Scotch Presbyterian paternal ancestry, a combination of qualities that quickly made her foremost in the movement in Ireland.

§ 25. Fresh Grounds of Hope.

At this period a new feature appeared on the horizon of electoral politics-the claim of the agricultural labourer to share the privileges bestowed by the Act of 1867 on small householders in boroughs, was debated for the first time in the House of Commons in April 1873, when Mr. G. O. Trevelyan introduced the Household Franchise

Counties Bill. Mr. Jacob Bright, on that occasion, pointed out that if justice demanded that a million of men be added to the register, which already contained two millions, justice demanded yet more urgently the admission of three hundred thousand women, seeing that women had not a particle of representation; and every argument now used with regard to the County Franchise Bill, told with even greater force with regard to the Women's Disabilities Bill. Mr. Bright subsequently gave notice of an amendnent in Committee to include women householders. The Bill, which did not go to a division, did not, however, reach Committee stage; but from that time forward the claim of the agricultural labourer had a foremost place amongst the topics of political speeches, and awakened a reasonable hope amongst the workers for Women's Suffrage that their claim might be considered alongside of the claim of the agricultural labourer, and Miss Becker, in the Women's Suffrage Journal, urged that meetings called for the purpose of recommending measures for the attention of Government would place the removal of the electoral disabilities of women on their lists-following the example set by a meeting of the Liberal Party in Birmingham on 10th December 1872, when Mr. S. Dixon, M.P., and Mr. Muntz, M.P., addressed their constituents, and a resolution was passed, in which "assimilation of the borough and county franchise" and "recognition of the rights of women (being householders) to the franchise" were included in the measures the meeting "trusted Ministers would introduce into Parliament as soon as practicable." That resolution was moved by Mr. JOSEPH CHAMBERLAIN, who