n we dare
your hate?

Persecution, like superstition, dies hard, but it dies. What though I
have suffered the heaviest punishment inflicted on a Freethinker for a
hundred and twenty years? Is not the night always darkest and coldest
before the dawn? Is not the tiger's dying spring most fierce and
terrible?

My sufferings, therefore, are not without the balm of consolation. I see
that the future is already brightening with a new hope. Without rising
to the supreme height of Danton, who cried "Let my name be blighted that
France be free," I feel a humbler pleasure in reflecting that I may
have been instrumental in breaking the last fetter on the freedom of the
press.

G. W. FOOTE.

_February 1st_, 1886.

CHAPTER I. THE STORM BREWING.

In the merry month of May, 1881, I started a paper called the
_Freethinker_, with the avowed object of waging "relentless war against
Superstition in general and the Christian Superstition in particular." I
stated in the first paragraph of the first number that this new journal
would have a new policy; that it would "do its best to employ the
resources of Science, Scholarship, Philosophy and Ethics against the
claims of the Bible as a Divine Revelation," and that it would "not
scruple to employ for the same purpose any weapons of ridicule or
sarcasm that might be borrowed from the armoury of Common Sense."

As the _Freethinker_ was published at the people's price of a penny,
and was always edited in a lively style, with a few short articles and
plenty of racy paragraphs, it succeeded from the first; and becoming
well known, not through profuse advertisement, but through the
recommendation of its readers, its circulation increased every week.
Within a year of its birth it had outdistanced all its predecessors. No
Freethought journal ever progressed with such amazing rapidity.
True, this was largely due to the fact that the Freethought party had
immensely increased in numbers; but much of it was also due to the
policy of the paper, which supplied, as the advertising gentry say, "a
long-felt want." Although the first clause of its original programme was
never wholly forgotten, we gradually paid the greatest attention to the
second, indulging more and more in Ridicule and Sarcasm, and more and
more cultivating Common Sense. A dangerous policy, as I was sometimes
warned; but for that very reason all the more necessary. The more
Bigotry writhed and raged, the more I felt that o