first dealt with the sexual relation, and advocated, from the standpoint of an experienced medical man, what is roughly known as “free love”; the second was entirely medical, dealing with diseases; the third consisted of a very clear and able exposition of the law of population as laid down by Malthus, and insisted—­as John Stuart Mill had done—­that it was the duty of married persons to voluntarily limit their families within their means of subsistence.  Mr. Bradlaugh, in the National Reformer, in reviewing the book, stated that it was written “with honest and pure intent and purpose”, and recommended to working men the exposition of the law of population.  Because he did this Christians and Tories who desire to injure him still insist that he shares the author’s views on sexual relations, and despite his reiterated contradictions, they quote detached pieces of the work, speaking against marriage, as containing his views.  Anything more meanly vile and dishonest than this it would be difficult to imagine, yet such are the weapons used against Atheists in a Christian country.  Unable to find in Mr. Bradlaugh’s own writings anything to serve their purpose, they take isolated passages from a book he neither wrote nor published, but once reviewed with a recommendation of a part of it which says nothing against marriage.

That the book is a remarkable one and deserves to be read has been acknowledged on all hands.  Personally, I cordially dislike a large part of it, and dissent utterly from its views on the marital relation, but none the less I feel sure that the writer is an honest, good, and right meaning man.  In the Reasoner, edited by Mr. George Jacob Holyoake, I find warmer praise of it than in the National Reformer; in the review the following passage appears:—­

“In some respects all books of this class are evils:  but it would be weakness and criminal prudery—­a prudery as criminal as vice itself—­not to say that such a book as the one in question is not only a far lesser evil than the one that it combats, but in one sense a book which it is a mercy to issue and courage to publish.”

The Examiner, reviewing the same book, declared it to be

“A very valuable, though rather heterogeneous book....  This is, we believe, the only book that has fully, honestly, and in a scientific spirit recognised all the elements in the problem—­How are mankind to triumph over poverty, with its train of attendant evils?—­and fearlessly endeavored to find a practical solution.”

The British Journal of Homaeopathy wrote: 

“Though quite out of the province of our journal, we cannot refrain from stating that this work is unquestionably the most remarkable one, in many respects, we have ever met with.  Though we differ toto coelo from the author in his views of religion and morality, and hold some of his remedies to tend rather to a dissolution than a reconstruction of society, yet we are bound to admit the benevolence and philanthropy of his motives.  The scope of the work is nothing less than the whole field of political economy.”