Never was Paris so crowded with members of the English governing classes; here was to be seen a famous ex-Minister; there the fine face of the president of a Royal society; at one table in the Cafe de la Paix, a millionaire recently ennobled, and celebrated for his exquisite taste in art; opposite to him a famous general.  It was even said that a celebrated English actor took a return ticket for three or four days to Paris, just to be in the fashion.  The mummer returned quickly; but the majority of the migrants stayed abroad for some time.  The wind of terror which had swept them across the Channel opposed their return, and they scattered over the Continent from Naples to Monte Carlo and from Palermo to Seville under all sorts of pretexts.

The gravest result of the magistrate’s refusal to accept bail was purely personal.  Oscar’s income dried up at the source.  His books were withdrawn from sale; no one went to see his plays; every shop keeper to whom he owed a penny took immediate action against him.  Judgments were obtained and an execution put into his house in Tite Street.  Within a month, at the very moment when he most needed money to fee counsel and procure evidence, he was beggared and sold up, and because of his confinement in prison the sale was conducted under such conditions that, whereas in ordinary times his effects would have covered the claims against him three times over, all his belongings went for nothing, and the man who was making L4,000 or L5,000 a year by his plays was adjudicated a bankrupt for a little over L1,000.  L600 of this sum were for Lord Queensberry’s costs which the Queensberry family—­Lord Douglas of Hawick, Lord Alfred Douglas and their mother—­had promised in writing to pay, but when the time came, absolutely refused to pay.  Most unfortunately many of Oscar’s MSS. were stolen or lost in the disorder of the sheriff’s legal proceedings.  Wilde could have cried, with Shylock, “You take my life when you do take away the means whereby I live.”  But at the time nine Englishmen out of ten applauded what was practically persecution.

A worse thing remains to be told.  The right of free speech which Englishmen pride themselves on had utterly disappeared, as it always does disappear in England when there is most need of it.  It was impossible to say one word in Wilde’s defence or even in extenuation of his sin in any London print.  At this time I owned the greater part of the Saturday Review and edited it.  Here at any rate one might have thought I could have set forth in a Christian country a sane and liberal view.  I had no wish to minimise the offence.  No one condemned unnatural vice more than I, but Oscar Wilde was a distinguished man of letters; he had written beautiful things, and his good works should have been allowed to speak in his favour.  I wrote an article setting forth this view.  My printers immediately informed me that they thought the article ill-advised, and when I insisted they said they would prefer not to print