[Footnote 37: "Manhood," Mr Bradlaugh explained later in answer to a letter from Mrs Law, he used "not in a sexual sense, but rather as asserting the right of every citizen to the franchise," with, of course, limitations as to insanity, etc. My father put his position in most unmistakable language in March 1884 in the _National Reformer_, in answer to a suggestion made by a correspondent that if there had been women-voters in Northampton he would not have been elected. "If the women-electors," he said, "thought fit to reject Mr Bradlaugh, and they made the majority, it would be their right. If Mr Bradlaugh were in the House of Commons he would vote for woman suffrage, even if he were sure he would in future be excluded by women's votes." And again in the December of the following year he urged: "Even if it were unfortunately true that every woman would always vote Tory, it would be the duty of Radicals to try and obtain the suffrage for them."] In May 1862 Messrs W. H. Smith & Son first officially refused to supply their agents with the _National Reformer_. They then occupied the chief railway station bookstalls in England, but were not quite the monopolists they are to-day, and Mr Bradlaugh could for a little while at least get his paper sold at all the stations, numbering some sixty or seventy, on the North Eastern and Newcastle and Carlisle railways, at which book agencies were held by a Mr Franklin. It is wonderful, indeed, how this journal managed to live through more than thirty years in spite of this powerful boycott, extending as it afterwards did to every part of the kingdom. Mr Bradlaugh called upon his friends to use every effort to keep up the sale. "We will do our part," he wrote, "and we call upon our friends, east, west, north, and south, to do their duty also." During the last year of his life Mr Bradlaugh was given to understand that the boycott would be raised, and that Messrs W. H. Smith & Son would be willing to take the _National Reformer_ on to the railway bookstalls, but the first expenses would have been so great that he was unwilling to enter into the further financial liabilities which the new departure would have involved. The _National Reformer_ was not only from its earliest years refused by the most powerful booksellers in England, but it was maligned in a quarter where indeed it might have looked for fair play and a little justice--I mean by the Unitarians.[38] The cynical reflection that those who have themselves broken away from the conventional thought of the times always damn those who go a little further than themselves, carries a germ of truth within its bitter shell. The Unitarian body always seem to treat Freethinkers with an acrimony special to themselves and us. Individual Unitarians whom I have known personally have been kind, pleasant, liberal-minded people, but Unitarians as a body or as represented by their organ seldom enough have turned a kindly side towards atheists.