sheer hard work, but I fancy that every Secularist lecturer could tell of similar experiences in the early days of “winning his way.”  The fact is that from Mr. Bradlaugh downwards every one of us could have earned a competence with comparative ease in any other line of work, and could have earned it with public approval instead of amid popular reproach.  Much of my early lecturing was done in Northumberland and Durham; the miners there are, as a rule, shrewd and hard-headed men, and very cordial is the greeting given by them to those they have reason to trust.  At Seghill and at Bedlington I have slept in their cottages and have been welcomed to their tables, and I have a vivid memory of one evening at Seghill, after a lecture, when my host, himself a miner, invited about a dozen of his comrades to supper to meet me; the talk ran on politics, and I soon found that my companions knew more of English politics, had a far shrewder notion of political methods, and were, therefore, much better worth talking to, than most of the ordinary men met at dinner parties “in society.”  They were of the “uneducated” class despised by “gentlemen,” and had not then the franchise, but politically they were far better educated than their social superiors, and were far better fitted to discharge the duties of citizenship.  How well, too, do I remember a ten-mile drive in a butcher’s cart, to give a lecture in an out-of-the-way spot, unapproached by railway.  Such was the jolting as we rattled over rough roads and stony places, that I felt as though all my bones were broken, and as though I should collapse on the platform like a bag half-filled with stones.  How kind they were to me, those genial, cordial miners, how careful for my comfort, and how motherly were the women!  Ah! if opponents of my views who did not know me were often cruel and malignant, there was compensation in the love and honour in which good men and women all the country over held me, and their devotion outweighed the hatred, and many a time and often soothed a weary and aching heart.

Lecturing in June, 1875, at Leicester, I came for the first time across a falsehood that brought sore trouble and cost me more pain than I care to tell.  An irate Christian opponent, in the discussion that followed the lecture, declared that I was responsible for a book entitled, “The Elements of Social Science,” which was, he averred, “The Bible of Secularists.”  I had never heard of the book, but as he stated that it was in favour of the abolition of marriage, and that Mr. Bradlaugh agreed with it, I promptly contradicted him; for while I knew nothing about the book, I knew a great deal about Mr. Bradlaugh, and I knew that on the marriage question he was conservative rather than revolutionary.  He detested “Free Love” doctrines, and had thrown himself strongly on the side of the agitation led so heroically for many years by Mrs. Josephine Butler.  On my return to London after the lecture I naturally made inquiry as to the volume and its contents,