The county election was raging. ... I was circulating in the mob as a volunteer (like all the other undergraduates) on the side of Norreys. I held fo… - William Ewart Gladstone

National injustice is the surest road to national downfall.

[I]f these islands were to be annexed they would present to us, in the most aggravated form, the difficulty arising from marked differences of race, which occurred already in some of our colonial possessions. Where the superior race was very large in numbers, and the less developed and less civilized race were small, the difficulty was little felt. In Porto Rico, for example, although there was a very large number of negroes—now, happily, no longer slaves—yet the number of Whites was extremely large in comparison, and the slave emancipation had been effected without difficulty. Jamaica was not like Porto Rico. The Whites were very small in number in Jamaica compared with the less developed race.

I am inclined to say that the personal attendance and intervention of women in election proceedings, even apart from any suspicion of the wider objects of many of the promoters of the present movement, would be a practical evil not only of the gravest, but even of an intolerable character.