"MY DEAR SIR,--Pray excuse my not having sooner answered, or noticed, your letter of the 7th inst. to me, tendering your resignation as a member of the Executive of the Reform League, and asking that your name may be erased from the list of the Council and Vice-Presidents. I really have been in such a whirl of occupation since receiving your letter that it was not in my power sooner to write to you, as I wished. Meanwhile you have, I believe, received through Mr Cooper and others intimation that the Executive were unwilling to accept your resignation, and lose your services. In that unwillingness I concur, whilst I avail myself of this opportunity of communicating to you with the utmost openness and frankness, and with very sincere regard, my feelings in the matter. I have already expressed in public my strong sense of the services you have rendered to the League by your ability and good sense, and of the invariable fidelity, delicacy, and admirable taste with which you have studiously abstained from uttering a word at our meetings that could offend the religious scruples of the most sensitive or fastidious Christian. At the same time that your known and published opinions on these matters (I do not allude to the subject of the _Saturday Review's_ savage attack, which was not, I believe, from your pen) have injured the League with many in a moral and pecuniary point of view must, I am afraid, be admitted, though I doubt whether such injury has outweighed the aid you have rendered to the League by your oratorical power and talent. At all events, I am not disposed to allow the evil to have outweighed the good. You say that the conduct of the Press in constantly coupling your name with mine has given me pain. Well, it has, but not quite from the cause you suppose. I despise from my soul the base motives of the writers in thus coupling our names together, and it would only make me more strongly tender to you the hand of friendship. But I do feel great pain at the thought of a man of your undoubted ability, and, I believe, purity of purpose and high honesty, being in such a position from your antagonism to Christianity as to make men imagine that they could pain or injure me or the League by thus coupling our names together. "C. BRADLAUGH. "E. BEALES." Mr George Howell, the Secretary, had also written expressing his deep regret at my father's resignation, and testifying to the kindly consideration shown himself, and to the earnest and powerful advocacy and support given to the objects of the League. Probably in consequence of the form taken by these aspersions Mr Bradlaugh was again elected on the Executive Council in December 1868. CHAPTER XXIV. PROVINCIAL LECTURING, 1866-1869.