“1st.  That the said book is not an obscene book within the meaning of the 20th and 21st Victoria, cap. 83. 2nd.  That the said book is a scientific treatise on the law of population and its connexion with poverty, and that there is nothing in the book which is not necessary and legitimate in the description of the question. 3rd.  That the advocacy of non-life-destroying checks to population is not an offence either at common law or by statute, and that the manner in which that advocacy is raised in the said book, ‘The Fruits of Philosophy’, is not such as makes it an indictable offence. 4th.  That the discussion and recommendation of checks to over-population after marriage is perfectly lawful, and that there is in the advocacy and recommendations contained in the book ‘Fruits of Philosophy’ nothing that is prurient or calculated to inflame the passions. 5th.  That the physiological information in the said book is such as is absolutely necessary for understanding the subjects treated, and such information is more fully given in Carpenter’s treatises on Physiology, and Kirke’s ‘Handbook of Physiology’, which later works are used for the instruction of the young under Government sanction. 6th.  That the whole of the physiological information contained in the said book, ‘The Fruits of Philosophy’, has been published uninterruptedly for fifty years, and still is published in dear books, and that the publication of such information in a cheap form cannot constitute an offence.”

After a long argument before Mr. Edlin and a number of other Middlesex magistrates, the Bench affirmed Mr. Vaughan’s order, whereupon Mr. Bradlaugh promptly obtained from the Lord Chief Justice and Mr. Justice Mellor a writ of certiorari, removing their order to the Queen’s Bench Division of the High Court of Justice with a view to quashing it.  The matter was not argued until the following November, on the 9th of which month it came on before Mr. Justice Mellor and Mr. Justice Field.  The Court decided in Mr. Bradlaugh’s favor and granted a rule quashing Mr. Vaughan’s order, and with this fell the order of the Middlesex magistrates.  The next thing was to recover the pamphlets thus rescued from destruction, and on December 3rd Mr. Bradlaugh appeared before Mr. Vaughan at Bow Street in support of a summons against Mr. Henry Wood, a police inspector, for detaining 657 copies of the “Fruits of Philosophy”.  After a long argument Mr. Vaughan ordered the pamphlets to be given up to him, and he carried them off in triumph, there and then, on a cab.  We labelled the rescued pamphlets and sold every one of them, in mocking defiance of the Vice Society.