report week after week.

Messrs. Hirsch and Fleury, however, had another invention in store.
They worked up the whole of the reports they had made into an
"original minute book" of the sittings of the Secret Supreme
Committee, whose existence was maintained by the Prussian police; and
Herr Stieber, finding that this book wondrously agreed with the
reports already received from the same parties, at once laid it before
the jury, declaring upon his oath that after serious examination, and
according to his fullest conviction, that book was genuine. It was
then that most of the absurdities reported by Hirsch were made public.
You may imagine the surprise of the pretended members of that Secret
Committee when they found things stated of them which they never knew
before. Some who were baptized William were here christened Louis or
Charles; others, at the time they were at the other end of England,
were made to have pronounced speeches in London; others were reported
to have read letters they never had received; they were made to have
met regularly on a Thursday, when they used to have a convivial
reunion, once a week, on Wednesdays; a working man, who could hardly
write, figured as one of the takers of minutes, and signed as such;
and they all of them were made to speak in a language which, if it may
be that of Prussian police stations, was certainly not that of a
reunion in which literary men, favorably known in their country,
formed the majority. And, to crown the whole, a receipt was forged for
a sum of money, pretended to have been paid by the fabricators to the
pretended secretary of the fictitious Central Committee for this book;
but the existence of this pretended secretary rested merely upon a
hoax that some malicious Communist had played upon the unfortunate
Hirsch.

This clumsy fabrication was too scandalous an affair not to produce
the contrary of its intended effect. Although the London friends of
the defendants were deprived of all means to bring the facts of the
case before the jury--although the letters they sent to the counsel
for the defence were suppressed by the post--although the documents
and affidavits they succeeded in getting into the hands of these legal
gentlemen were not admitted in evidence, yet the general indignation
was such that even the public accusers, nay, even Herr Stieber--whose
oath had been given as a guarantee for the authenticity of that
book--were compelled to recognize it as a forg