from Thursday to Monday, and we were only allowed to see them through iron bars and lattice, as they exercised in the prison yard between 8:30 and 9:30 a.m.  Brought up to trial again on Monday, they were convicted, and Mr. Foote was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment, Mr. Ramsey to nine months, and Mr. Kemp to three months.  Mr. Foote especially behaved with great dignity and courage in a most difficult position, and heard his cruel sentence without wincing, and with the calm words, “My Lord, I thank you; it is worthy your creed.”  A few of us at once stepped in, to preserve to Mr. Ramsey his shop, and to Mr. Foote his literary property; Dr. Aveling undertook the editing of the Freethinker and of Mr. Foote’s magazine Progress; the immediate necessities of their families were seen to; Mr. and Mrs. Forder took charge of the shop, and within a few days all was in working order.  Disapproving as many of us did of the policy of the paper, there was no time to think of that when a blasphemy prosecution had proved successful, and we all closed up in the support of men imprisoned for conscience’ sake.  I commenced a series of articles on “The Christian Creed; what it is blasphemy to deny,” showing what Christians must believe under peril of prosecution.  Everywhere a tremendous impulse was given to the Freethought movement, as men awakened to the knowledge that blasphemy laws were not obsolete.

From over the sea came a word of sympathy from the pen of H.P.  Blavatsky in the Theosophist.  “We prefer Mr. Foote’s actual position to that of his severe judge.  Aye, and were we in his guilty skin, we would feel more proud, even in the poor editor’s present position, than we would under the wig of Mr. Justice North.”

In April, 1883, the long legal struggles of Mr. Bradlaugh against Mr. Newdegate and his common informer, that had lasted from July 2, 1880, till April 9, 1883, ended in his complete victory by the judgment of the House of Lords in his favour.  “Court after Court decided against me,” he wrote; “and Whig and Tory journals alike mocked at me for my persistent resistance.  Even some good friends thought that my fight was hopeless, and that the bigots held me fast in their toils.  I have, however, at last shaken myself free of Mr. Newdegate and his common informer.  The judgment of the House of Lords in my favour is final and conclusive, and the boasts of the Tories that I should be made bankrupt for the penalties, have now, for ever, come to naught.  Yet but for the many poor folk who have stood by me with their help and sympathy, I should have long since been ruined.  The days and weeks spent in the Law Courts, the harassing work connected with each stage of litigation, the watching daily when each hearing was imminent, the absolute hindrance of all provincial lecturing—­it is hardly possible for any one to judge the terrible mental and pecuniary strain of all this long-drawn-out struggle.”  Aye! it killed him at last, twenty years before his time, sapping his splendid vitality, undermining his iron constitution.