In consequence of this, it was not until the 16th of May that the long-drawn-out proceedings in this suit--involving at the outset a simple business transaction, but now including far wider issues--entered upon their final stage. For more than two years justice had been persistently perverted from its course, and used as the tool of fraud, but now at length matters wore a different aspect. The case was heard in the Court of Exchequer Chamber, before Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, Lord Chief Baron Kelly, Justices Blackburn, Mellor, and Lush, and Barons Channell and Cleasby. The Court was unanimous in its decision that the endorsee was entitled to sue, and that the verdict must be entered for Mr Bradlaugh. The Lord Chief Justice remarked that the defendant had no merits at all in the case; he had relied upon this "somewhat unrighteous" defence, and the judgment now given was "in accordance with the good sense and justice and equity in the case." So, in the end, my father won his suit, but the victory was very costly. The judgment of the Court of Exchequer did not entitle him to recover any of the expenses he had incurred in fighting the oath question. Upon that point the decision of the Court of Common Pleas was final. In a public statement made at the end of the year at Bristol, in reply to some observations which had fallen from Professor Newman, Mr Bradlaugh remarked that in contesting the oath question in the law courts he had himself lost £1500. This was an allusion to his losses in the De Rin case, the costs in which alone reached to more than £1100; in addition to these enormous costs, he lost his debt of £360 because the Christian De Rin, who objected to the evidence of an Atheist, became bankrupt when the case was finally decided. Before the passing of the Evidence Amendment Act in 1869 all persons who disbelieved in God or in a future state of rewards and punishments were held to be incompetent to give evidence in a Court of Law. Freethinkers had long and bitterly felt the injustice and hardship of their position; and in 1868 and 1869, after the first action in the case of Bradlaugh and De Rin, a most determined effort was made to move Parliament to amend the law of evidence. The National Secular Society sent in petitions to the House of Commons, and the Executive of that Society put itself in communication with members of both Houses. Mr Bradlaugh said in 1870 that they tried "to pass a much more distinct clause in favour of Freethinkers than the one as it now stands, which is in its legal effect entirely different from the clause as originally drawn by the Hon. Mr Denman, and printed in the Bill first read before the Commons. It is Lord Cairns to whom we were ultimately indebted for the main words which really serve us in the Act of 1869."