312 " MY KINGDOM FOR A HORSE ! " 



the importance of keeping pure the fount of justice, 

 proceeded to state that the defendants, it was found, were 

 not personally responsible for the libel, and had not even 

 been cognisant of it until it was brought to their notice. 

 They had expressed their regret that it should have 

 appeared in a paper to which their names were attached, 

 and they had undertaken to exercise great care in future 

 to prevent any recurrence of such an offence. In the 

 circumstances it was not proposed to offer any evidence. 



The defendants were accordingly discharged, and some 

 of the Middlesex Magistrates breathed more freely. 



This conclusion did not suit the Opposition Press at all, 

 and Mr W. T. Stead published a diatribe against it in The 

 Pall Mall Gazette. Why, he asked, had the editor of 

 St Stephen's Review not been prosecuted instead of these 

 two harmless persons, against whom no evidence could be 

 offered? 



It was well known, he continued, that the editor had 

 been sent by the Government to America under the pre- 

 text of buying horses there, but really to be out of the 

 way ! 



Of course, this statement was totally devoid of founda- 

 tion, but it mattered not to me. 



Legal troubles continued to accumulate, for while I 

 was in court over the Bradlaugh business, the sub-editor 

 sent the paper to press with the seeds of further trouble 

 in it. This was the issue of 24th March 1888, and it 

 contained a paragraph in reference to a so-called " London 

 Anti-coercion and Home Rule Committee," which, it said : 



consists of some half-dozen gabblers who infest Hyde Park, 

 Mile End waste, the arches beneath St Pancras Station and 

 Clerkenwell Green at various times during Sunday ; make illiterate, 

 lying and abusive speeches, and of course go round with the hat. 

 . . . These sham delegates are simply persons who fell out with 

 hard and honest work many years ago and have never made 

 up the quarrel yet. Neither will they, while they have a wife or a 

 mo thereto keep them in "boozy " idleness, and can find crowds 

 of gaping idiots willing to subscribe their hard-earned shillings 

 and pence to find them in luxuries. 



