3io " MY KINGDOM FOR A HORSE ! ' 



Meanwhile I had many friends in court who were immensely 

 entertained by my really absurd position. Mr Justice 

 Manisty concluded by saying that I was to be fined 

 20 and costs. This meant something considerably over 

 200 in all. 



Then Mr Justice Hawkins began, and having been 

 baulked of his Holloway vengeance, he let out as best 

 he could with words. I thought at once the best way to 

 meet this was to assume a look of absolute stupidity and 

 stare full in his face all the time without showing any 

 semblance of noticing a word he said. This I did through- 

 out fully twenty minutes, and I could see that he became 

 more and more angry at my absolutely impassive con- 

 dition. " The form of his countenance changed " and 

 he heaped words on words of condemnation, but I con- 

 tinued to look vacantly at him without the slightest 

 external indication that I even heard, still less under- 

 stood what he was talking about. 



It was a somewhat subtle method of getting a bit of 

 my own back, but I know very well it drove right home. 



All this possesses no small interest inasmuch as it is so 

 intimately concerned with the first advances in the career 

 of Mr Justice Darling, who is generally regarded as the 

 best judge on the Bench at the present time. I was 

 giving evidence before him in a horse case three or four 

 years ago, and I wondered then whether he remembered 

 these things. 



Commenting on the Contempt proceedings, The Observer, 

 26th March 1888, said : 



Mr Peters, it will be remembered, commenced his action against 

 Mr Bradlaugh in the Mayor's Court. The defendant had succeeded 

 in removing it into the High Court, and applied to Mr Manley 

 Smith for a month's time to plead. At this period the paragraphs 

 complained of appeared. They contrasted, and unsparingly 

 commented on, the steps Mr Bradlaugh was then taking and his 

 previous demand in the House of Commons for immediate inquiry 

 into his dispute with Lord Salisbury. The editor avowed the 

 authorship, and stated that he wrote with no intention of reflecting 

 on the Court or of prejudicing the defendant in the action ; his 



