custody of the child were set aside.  The Court of Appeal in April, 1879, upheld the decision, the absolute right of the father as against a married mother being upheld.  This ignoring of all right to her children on the part of the married mother is a scandal and a wrong that has since been redressed by Parliament, and the husband has no longer in his grasp this instrument of torture, whose power to agonise depends on the tenderness and strength of the motherliness of the wife.  In the days when the law took my child from me, it virtually said to all women:  “Choose which of these two positions, as wife and mother, you will occupy.  If you are legally your husband’s wife, you can have no legal claim to your children; if legally you are your husband’s mistress, your rights as mother are secure.”  That stigma on marriage is now removed.

One thing I gained in the Court of Appeal.  The Court expressed a strong view as to my right of access, and directed me to apply to Sir George Jessel for it, adding that it could not doubt he would grant it.  Under cover of this I applied to the Master of the Rolls, and obtained liberal access to the children; but I found that my visits kept Mabel in a continual state of longing and fretting for me, while the ingenious forms of petty insult that were devised against me and used in the children’s presence would soon become palpable to them and cause continual pain.  So, after a painful struggle with myself, I resolved to give up the right of seeing them, feeling that thus only could I save them from constantly recurring conflict, destructive of all happiness and of all respect for one or the other parent.  Resolutely I turned my back on them that I might spare them trouble, and determined that, robbed of my own, I would be a mother to all helpless children I could aid, and cure the pain at my own heart by soothing the pain of others.

As far as regards this whole struggle over the Knowlton pamphlet, victory was finally won all along the line.  Not only did we, as related, recover all our seized pamphlets, and continue the sale till all prosecution and threat of prosecution were definitely surrendered; but my own tract had an enormous sale, so that when I withdrew it from sale in June, 1891, I was offered a large sum for the copyright, an offer which I, of course, refused.  Since that time not a copy has been sold with my knowledge or permission, but long ere that the pamphlet had received a very complete legal vindication.  For while it circulated untouched in England, a prosecution was attempted against it in New South Wales, but was put an end to by an eloquent and luminous judgment by the senior puisne judge of the Supreme Court, Mr. Justice Windmeyer, in December, 1888.  This judge, the most respected in the great Australian colony, spoke out plainly and strongly on the morality of such teaching.  “Take the case,” he said, “of a woman married to a drunken husband, steadily ruining his constitution