held on May 16th at the Central Criminal Court before Baron Pollock and a common jury, Professor Hunter and Mr. J.M.  Davidson appearing for the defence.  The jury convicted, and the brave old man, sixty-eight years of age, was condemned to four months’ imprisonment and L50 fine for selling a pamphlet which had been sold unchallenged, during a period of forty-five years, by James Watson, George Jacob Holyoake, Austin Holyoake, and Charles Watts.  Mr. Grain, the counsel employed by the Vice Society, most unfairly used against Mr. Truelove my “Law of Population,” a pamphlet which contained, Baron Pollock said, “the head and front of the offence in the other [the Knowlton] case.”  I find an indignant protest against this odious unfairness in the National Reformer for May 19th:  “My ‘Law of Population’ was used against Mr. Truelove as an aggravation of his offence, passing over the utter meanness—­worthy only of Collette—­of using against a prisoner a book whose author has never been attacked for writing it—­does Mr. Collette, or do the authorities, imagine that the severity shown to Mr. Truelove will in any fashion deter me from continuing the Malthusian propaganda?  Let me here assure them, one and all, that it will do nothing of the kind; I shall continue to sell the ‘Law of Population’ and to advocate scientific checks to population, just as though Mr. Collette and his Vice Society were all dead and buried.  In commonest justice they are bound to prosecute me, and if they get, and keep, a verdict against me, and succeed in sending me to prison, they will only make people more anxious to read my book, and make me more personally powerful as a teacher of the views which they attack.”

A persistent attempt was made to obtain a writ of error in Mr. Truelove’s case, but the Tory Attorney-General, Sir John Holker, refused it, although the ground on which it was asked was one of the grounds on which a similar writ had been granted to Mr. Bradlaugh and myself.  Mr. Truelove was therefore compelled to suffer his sentence, but memorials, signed by 11,000 persons, asking for his release, were sent to the Home Secretary from every part of the country, and a crowded meeting in St. James’s Hall, London, demanded his liberation with only six dissentients.  The whole agitation did not shorten Mr. Truelove’s sentence by a single day, and he was not released from Coldbath Fields Prison until September 5th.  On the 12th of the same month the Hall of Science was crowded with enthusiastic friends, who assembled to do him honour, and he was presented with a beautifully-illuminated address and a purse containing L177 (subsequent subscriptions raised the amount to L197 16s. 6d.).