ling with formulae and problems. The full access I gained to my
children marked a step in the long battle of Freethinkers against
disabilities, for, as noted in the _National Reformer_ by Mr.
Bradlaugh, it was "won with a pleading unequalled in any case on
record for the boldness of its affirmation of Freethought," a pleading
of which he generously said that it deserved well of the party as "the
most powerful pleading for freedom of opinion to which it has ever
been our good fortune to listen."

In the London _Daily News_ some powerful letters of protest appeared,
one from Lord Harberton, in which he declared that "the Inquisition
acted on no other principle" than that applied to me; and a second
from Mr. Band, in which he sarcastically observed that "this Christian
community has for some time had the pleasure of seeing her Majesty's
courts repeatedly springing engines of torture upon a young mother--a
clergyman's wife who dared to disagree with his creed--and her evident
anguish, her long and expensive struggles to save her child, have
proved that so far as heretical mothers are concerned modern defenders
of the faith need not envy the past those persuasive instruments which
so long secured the unity of the Church. In making Mrs. Besant an
example, the Master of the Rolls and Lord Justice James have been
careful not to allow any of the effect to be lost by confusion of the
main point--the intellectual heresy--with side questions. There was a
Malthusian matter in the case, but the judges were very clear in
stating that without any reference whatever to that, they would
simply, on the ground of Mrs. Besant's 'religious, or anti-religious,
opinions,' take her child from her." The great provincial papers took
a similar tone, the _Manchester Examiner_ going so far as to say of
the ruling of the judges: "We do not say they have done so wrongly. We
only say that the effect of their judgment is cruel, and it shows that
the holding of unpopular opinions is, in the eye of the law, an
offence which, despite all we had thought to the contrary, may be
visited with the severest punishment a woman and a mother can be
possibly called on to bear." The outcome of all this long struggle and
of another case of sore injustice--in which Mrs. Agar-Ellis, a Roman
Catholic, was separated from her children by a judicial decision
obtained against her by her husband, a Protestant--was a change in the
law which had vested all power over the childr