so-called Liberal Government in full tilt against the Irish leaders, and I worked hard to raise English feeling in defence of Irish freedom even against attack by one so much honoured as was Mr. Gladstone.  It was uphill work, for harsh language had been used against England and all things English, but I showed by definite figures—­all up and down England—­that life and property were far safer in Ireland than in England, that Ireland was singularly free from crime save in agrarian disputes, and I argued that these would disappear if the law should step in between landlord and tenant, and by stopping the crimes of rack-renting and most brutal eviction, put an end to the horrible retaliations that were born of despair and revenge.  A striking point on these evictions I quoted from Mr. T.P.  O’Connor, who, using Mr. Gladstone’s words that a sentence of eviction was a sentence of starvation, told of 15,000 processes of eviction issued in that one year.  The autumn’s work was varied by the teaching of science classes, a debate with a clergyman of the Church of England, and an operation which kept me in bed for three weeks, but which, on the other hand, was useful, for I learned to write while lying on my back, and accomplished in this fashion a good part of the translation of “Mind in Animals.”

And here let me point a moral about hard work.  Hard work kills no one.  I find a note in the National Reformer in 1880 from the pen of Mr. Bradlaugh:  “It is, we fear, useless to add that, in the judgment of her best friends, Mrs. Besant has worked far too hard during the last two years.”  This is 1893, and the thirteen years’ interval has been full of incessant work, and I am working harder than ever now, and in splendid health.  Looking over the National Reformer for all these years, it seems to me that it did really fine educational work; Mr. Bradlaugh’s strenuous utterances on political and theological matters; Dr. Aveling’s luminous and beautiful scientific teachings; and to my share fell much of the educative work on questions of political and national morality in our dealings with weaker nations.  We put all our hearts into our work, and the influence exercised was distinctly in favour of pure living and high thinking.

In the spring of 1881 the Court of Appeal decided against Mr. Bradlaugh’s right to affirm as Member of Parliament, and his seat was declared vacant, but he was at once returned again by the borough of Northampton, despite the virulence of slander directed against him, so that he rightly described the election as “the most bitter I have ever fought.”  His work in the House had won him golden opinions in the country, and he was already recognised as a power there; so Tory fear was added to bigoted hatred, and the efforts to keep him out of the House were increased.