The Solicitor-General made a bitter and violent speech, full of party hate and malice, endeavoring to prejudice the jury against the work by picking out bits of medical detail and making profuse apologies for reading them, and shuddering and casting up his eyes with all the skill of a finished actor.  For a man accustomed to Old Bailey practice he was really marvellously easily shocked; a simple physiological fact brought him to the verge of tears, while the statement that people often had too large families covered him with such modest confusion that he found it hard to continue his address.  It fell to my lot to open the defence, and to put the general line of argument by which we justified the publication; Mr. Bradlaugh dealt with the defence of the book as a medical work—­until the Lord Chief Justice suggested that there was no “redundancy of details, or anything more than it is necessary for a medical man to know”—­and strongly urged that the knowledge given by the pamphlet was absolutely necessary for the poor.  We called as witnesses for the defence Miss Alice Vickery—­the first lady who passed the examination of the Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain, and who has since passed the examinations qualifying her to act as a physician—­Dr. Charles Drysdale, and Mr. H.G.  Bohn.  Dr. Drysdale bore witness to the medical value of the pamphlet, stating that “considering it was written forty years ago ... the writer must have been a profound student of physiology, and far advanced in the medical science of his time”.  “I have always considered it an excellent treatise, and I have found among my professional brethren that they have had nothing to say against it.”  Mr. Bohn bore witness that he had published books which “entirely covered your book, and gave a great deal more.”  Mr. Bradlaugh and myself then severally summed up our case, and the Solicitor-General made a speech for the prosecution very much of the character of his first one, doing all he could to inflame the minds of the jury against us.  The Lord Chief Justice, to quote a morning paper, “summed up strongly for an acquittal”.  He said that “a more ill-advised and more injudicious proceeding in the way of a prosecution was probably never brought into a Court of Justice”.  He described us as “two enthusiasts, who have been actuated by the desire to do good in a particular department of Society”.  He bade the jury be careful “not to abridge the full and free right of public discussion, and the expression of public and private opinion on matters which are interesting to all, and materially affect the welfare of society.”  Then came an admirable statement of the law of population, and of his own view of the scope of the book which I present in full as our best justification.