importance like the present, and I will not
strain it for that purpose. As pointed out by Lord Cockburn in the
case of the Queen v. Bradlaugh and Besant, all prosecutions of this
kind should be regarded as mischievous, even by those who disapprove
the opinions sought to be stifled, inasmuch as they only tend more
widely to diffuse the teaching objected to. To those, on the other
hand, who desire its promulgation, it must be a matter of
congratulation that this, like all attempted persecutions of thinkers,
will defeat its own object, and that truth, like a torch, 'the more
it's shook it shines.'"

The argument of Mr. Justice Windmeyer for the Neo-Malthusian position
was (as any one may see who reads the full text of the judgment) one
of the most luminous and cogent I have ever read. The judgment was
spoken of at the time in the English press as a "brilliant triumph for
Mrs. Besant," and so I suppose it was; but no legal judgment could
undo the harm wrought on the public mind in England by malignant and
persistent misrepresentation. What that trial and its results cost me
in pain no one but myself will ever know; on the other hand, there was
the passionate gratitude evidenced by letters from thousands of poor
married women--many from the wives of country clergymen and
curates--thanking and blessing me for showing them how to escape from
the veritable hell in which they lived. The "upper classes" of society
know nothing about the way in which the poor live; how their
overcrowding destroys all sense of personal dignity, of modesty, of
outward decency, till human life, as Bishop Fraser justly said, is
"degraded below the level of the swine." To such, and among such I
went, and I could not grudge the price that then seemed to me as the
ransom for their redemption. To me, indeed, it meant the losing of all
that made life dear, but for them it seemed to be the gaining of all
that gave hope of a better future. So how could I hesitate--I whose
heart had been fired by devotion to an ideal Humanity, inspired by
that Materialism that is of love and not of hate?

And now, in August, 1893, we find the _Christian World,_ the
representative organ of orthodox Christian Protestantism, proclaiming
the right and the duty of voluntary limitation of the family. In a
leading article, after a number of letters had been inserted, it
said:--

"The conditions are assuredly wrong which bring one member of the
married partnership into a bondage