The Life of a Great Sportsman 



and that to fight so radical a borough with such a strong 

 opponent, as well as being the sitting member, was almost 

 foredoomed to failure. 



But at any rate Maunsell and his supporters, although they 

 were not rewarded by a victory, which would, under the cir- 

 cumstances, have been almost a miracle, succeeded in pulling 

 down Mr. Waddy's majority by over 2400, and only lost the 

 election by 165 votes. 



This, as all his supporters declared, was a moral victory, 

 and naturally at the next General Election of 1892 my 

 brother was encouraged to try his luck again in the same 

 division, in which, though still as Liberal as ever, his 

 triumphant return was confidently predicted by his friends. 



All is fair in love and war, and we must call a Parlia- 

 mentary contest, worked as it unfortunately is on such strong 

 party lines, the nearest approach to Civil War that this 

 enlightened twentieth century achieves, unless by the time 

 this book is published we shall have experienced that horror 

 in Ireland. A most unfortunate private circumstance, attend- 

 ing Mr. Waddy's personality as a Queen's Counsel, consisted 

 in the fact that, but for a love affair in which he had played a 

 prominent legal part some years previously, the 165 votes 

 which he scored to win would certainly have been given to my 

 brother. 



At the General Election in 1886 there was a second cousin 

 of ours living at Caistor, Lincolnshire, a certain Miss Mary 

 Anne Marris. Her father, the late Mr. George M arris, our 

 grandmothers brother, had been Caistor's leading townsman 

 and richest inhabitant, and in his capacity of an old-fashioned 

 county solicitor numbered amongst his clients all the members 

 of the Richardson family. He was also the coroner of the 

 district, the Mary Anne just mentioned being his only child. 



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