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