[Footnote 40: "This writ is issued against you for the recovery of two penalties of £50 and £20 incurred by you in respect of the publication and sale of '_The National Reformer_, Secular Advocate and Freethought Journal' newspaper of 3rd May 1868, without making the Declaration and Recognisances, required respectively by the Statutes 6 and 7 Wm. iv. cap. 76, and 1st Wm. iv. cap. 73; and also for two other like penalties in respect of the publication and sale of the newspaper of 18th May 1868."] From this "information," with its customary confusion of legal jargon retailed to clients at so much per folio, we may extricate three essential points, which I will put plainly in as many lines, viz., that Mr Bradlaugh was being proceeded against for (1) publishing the _National Reformer_; for (2) being the proprietor of it; and for (3) selling the paper so published and owned "at a less price than sixpence, to wit, at the price of twopence." These last words were pregnant with meaning, for, as my father wrote at the time, "If the price was sixpence I should not be prosecutable; it is only cheap blasphemy and sedition which is liable to be suppressed." The rich might read the covert blasphemies of an affectedly pious and unaffectedly sixpenny weekly journal, or dally over expensive and erudite treatises which were openly heretical; but ignorance and religion were necessary to the masses to keep them in proper subjection, and woe betide those rash men who ventured to throw open to these the door of the Chamber of Knowledge! Has not this been the law of England, and is it not in fact the sentiment of certain Englishmen even to-day?