[Footnote 163: A question put to Mr Mundella on 18th June in the House elicited the fact that the Hall of Science classes had been established, and received grants, under the late Tory administration. On this Lord George Hamilton was petty enough to put the blame on his subordinates. Mr Mundella answered that for his part he was responsible for anything done by his subordinates.] Among the most prominent of the attacks made on Bradlaugh about this time were the (second and third) articles contributed by Cardinal Manning to the _Nineteenth Century_, one under the title "An Englishman's Protest." The second was in time for the election in March, and much was hoped from it. Later, after illegally visiting Northampton in prelatic state, to turn the Irish voters against the Atheist, he contributed yet a third article to the _Nineteenth Century_ of September 1882; and still the editor denied Bradlaugh all right of reply. It is probable that at no time in the long strife were Freethinkers more roused to wrath, more moved to smite arrogant insolence upon its blatant mouth, than by this manifesto from a prince of the Church of Rome, the murderous organism which had eaten out the mind of Spain and barely missed destroying Italy. Certain it is that from these malevolent outbreaks of the unsleeping Romish spirit of persecution may be dated a new birth of enmity towards Rome on the part of English rationalists, who had before been disposed to class the bloody-mindedness of Catholicism with the kindred rancours of Protestantism. It was left to Manning to put his Church in the worst light of all; to show once for all that the fundamental mission of priestly Rome is not _parcere subjectis et debellare superbos_, but to fight the ignoble battle of the million against one. And it is to his action that his co-religionists owe most of the measure of acceptation found among Freethinkers by the fierce verse in which Mr Swinburne has named the Church of Rome "Grey spouse of Satan, church of name abhorred," and taunted the "withered harlot" with the shame of her defeat on the Field of Flowers. But Bradlaugh met the priest's attack with a prose that suffered no weakening from hysteria. In his journal it met a detailed and judicial criticism: he himself, roused as he had never been roused before, published his tract, "A Cardinal's Broken Oath," one of the hardest blows ever struck in written controversy.