the life thrust on them! who inherit the diseases and adopt the crimes which poverty and misery have provided for them?  The very medical works I have put in in this case show how true this is in too many cases, and if you read the words of Dr. Acton, crime is sometimes involved of a terrible nature which the human tongue governed by training shrinks from describing.  We justly or erroneously believe that we are doing our duty in putting this information in the hands of the people, and we contest this case with no kind of bravado; the penalty we already have to pay is severe enough, for even while we are defending this, some portion of the public press is using words of terrorism against the witnesses to be called, and is describing myself and my co-defendant in a fashion that I feel sure will find no sanction here, and that I hope will never occur again.  We contest this because the advocacy of such views on population has been familiar to me for many years.  The Public Journal of Health, edited by Dr. Hardwicke, the coroner for Central Middlesex, will show you that in 1868 I was known, in relation to this question, to men high in position in the land as original thinkers and political economists; that the late John Stuart Mill has left behind him, in his Autobiography, testimony concerning me on this subject, according unqualified praise to me for the views thereon which I had labored to disseminate; and that Lord Amberley thanked me, in a society of which we were then both associates, for having achieved what I had in bringing these principles to the knowledge of the poorer classes of the people.  With taxation on every hand extending, with the cost of living increasing, and with wages declining—­and, as to the last element, I am reminded that recently I was called upon to arbitrate in a wages’ dispute in the north of England for a number of poor men, and, having minutely scrutinised every side of the situation, was compelled to reduce their wages by 15 per cent., there having been already a reduction of 35 per cent, in the short space of some twenty months previously—­I say, with wages declining, with the necessaries of life growing dearer and still dearer, and with the burden of rent and taxation ever increasing—­ if, in the presence of such a condition of life among the vast industrial and impoverished masses of this land, I am not to be allowed to tell them how best to prevent or to ameliorate the wretchedness of their lot—­if, with all this, I may not speak to them of the true remedy, but the law is to step in and say to me, ‘Your mouth is closed’; then, I ask you, what remedy is there remaining by which I am to deal with this awful misery?”