During the autumn my father gave a lecture on behalf of the London Republican Club, and upon this speech all sorts of rumours were founded, not indeed upon what my father actually did say, but upon what his detractors chose to believe he said. Mr Disraeli had recently stated at an agricultural meeting at Hughenden[137] that it could not be concealed that Her Majesty was "physically and morally incapacitated from performing her duties," and my father took these words as the text of his lecture for the Republican Club in London. His speech, which was unusually long, occupying close upon an hour and a half, was a most careful recital of the duties of the Monarch and the rights and duties of the people, with special reference to the course pursued during the periods when George III. was officially declared incapable of performing the royal functions. Shorthand writers were present, and this address, or parts of it, was telegraphed all over the United Kingdom, to America and to the Continent. Much of it appeared in the American and Continental press of the next day or so, and after a short interval distorted accounts of it were to be heard of in most parts of England. There was one passage in particular upon which a whole mountain of misrepresentation and worse[138] was afterwards based. In the course of his address Mr Bradlaugh had said: "Many of you are aware that I have lately repeatedly declared my most earnest desire that the present Prince of Wales should never dishonour this country by becoming its King. My opinion is that if four or five years of political education are allowed to continue in this land, that worthy representative of an unworthy race will never be King of England. My thorough conviction is that neither his intelligence, nor his virtues, nor his political ability, nor his military capacity--great as all these are for a member of his family--can entitle him to occupy the throne of Great Britain. I am equally opposed to his ever being Regent of England. I trust that he may never sit on the throne or lounge under its shadow." [Footnote 137: September 26, 1871.] [Footnote 138: See Chapter ix., vol. ii.]