ce willingly, since compulsion to justice there was
none. His service to India in the latest years of his life was no
suddenly accepted task. He had spoken for her, pleaded for her, for
many a long year, through press and on platform, and his spurs as
member for India were won long ere he was member of Parliament.

A place on the staff of the _National Reformer_ was offered me by Mr.
Bradlaugh a few days after our first meeting, and the small weekly
salary thus earned--it was only a guinea, for national reformers are
always poor--was a very welcome addition to my resources. My first
contribution appeared in the number for August 30, 1874, over the
signature of "Ajax," and I wrote in it regularly until Mr. Bradlaugh
died; from 1877 until his death I sub-edited it, so as to free him
from all the technical trouble and the weary reading of copy, and for
part of this period was also co-editor. I wrote at first under a _nom
de guerre_, because the work I was doing for Mr. Scott would have been
prejudiced had my name appeared in the columns of the terrible
_National Reformer_, and until this work--commenced and paid for--was
concluded I did not feel at liberty to use my own name. Afterwards, I
signed my _National Reformer_ articles, and the tracts written for Mr.
Scott appeared anonymously.

The name was suggested by the famous statue of
"Ajax Crying for Light," a cast of which may be seen
in the centre walk by any visitor to the Crystal Palace,
Sydenham. The cry through the darkness for light,
even though light should bring destruction, was one
that awoke the keenest sympathy of response from my
heart:

"If our fate be death
Give light, and let us die!"

To see, to know, to understand, even though the seeing blind, though
the knowledge sadden, though the understanding shatter the dearest
hopes--such has ever been the craving of the upward-striving mind in
man. Some regard it as a weakness, as a folly, but I am sure that it
exists most strongly in some of the noblest of our race; that from the
lips of those who have done most in lifting the burden of ignorance
from the overstrained and bowed shoulders of a stumbling world has
gone out most often into the empty darkness the pleading, impassioned
cry:

"Give light!"

The light may come with a blinding flash, but it is light none the
less, and we can see.

And now the time had come when I was to use that gift of speech which
I had discovered in Sibse