While this struggle was raging, an old friend of Mr. Bradlaugh’s, Mr. George Odger, was slowly passing away; the good old man lay dying in his poor lodgings in High Street, Oxford Street, and I find recorded in the National Reformer of March 4th, that on February 28th we had been to see him, and that “he is very feeble and is, apparently, sinking fast; but he is as brave and bright, facing his last enemy, as he has ever been facing his former ones”.  He died on March 4th, and was buried in Brompton Cemetery on the 10th of the same month.

A grave question now lay before us for decision.  The Knowlton pamphlet had been surrendered; was that surrender to stand as the last word of the Freethought party on a book which had been sold by the most prominent men in its ranks for forty years?  To our minds such surrender, left unchallenged, would be a stain on all who submitted to it, and we decided that faulty as the book was in many respects it had yet become the symbol of a great principle, of the right to circulate physiological knowledge among the poor in pamphlets published at a price they could afford to pay.  Deliberately counting the risk, recognising that by our action we should subject ourselves to the vilest slander, knowing that Christian malice would misrepresent and ignorance would echo the misrepresentation —­we yet resolved that the sacrifice must be made, and made by us in virtue of our position in the Freethought Party.  If the leaders flinched how could the followers be expected to fight?  The greatest sacrifice had to be made by Mr. Bradlaugh.  How would an indictment for publishing an obscene book affect his candidature for Northampton?  What a new weapon for his foes, what a new difficulty for his friends!  I may say here that our worst forebodings were realised by the event; we have been assailed as “vendors of obscene literature”, as “writers of obscene books”, as “living by the circulation of filthy books”.  And it is because such accusations have been widely made that I here place on permanent record the facts of the case, for thus, at least, some honest opponents will learn the truth and will cease to circulate the slanders they may have repeated in ignorance.

On February 27th our determination to republish the Knowlton pamphlet was announced by Mr. Bradlaugh in an address delivered by him at the Hall of Science on “The Right of Publication”.  Extracts from a brief report, published in the National Reformer of March 11th, will show the drift of his statement: 

“Mr. Bradlaugh was most warmly welcomed to the platform, and reiterated cheers greeted him as he rose to make his speech.  Few who heard him that evening will forget the passion and the pathos with which he spoke.  The defence of the right to publish was put as strongly and as firmly as words could put it, and the determination to maintain that right, in dock and in jail as on the platform, rang out with no uncertain sound.  Truly, as the orator said: