On the platform are gathered every member of the Ministry and every D’Estrangeite Member of Parliament. Truly a royal welcome by staunch and faithful friends; for as Gloria dismounts and steps upon the platform she is greeted with a loud long cheer by these men of generous mould, who have fought so nobly on behalf of her holy cause. All honour be to them for ever! Sir Arthur Hazlerigg, Lord Mayor of London, presents and reads the address of welcome, and as he concludes it, Gloria de Lara stands forward to reply. An intense silence falls. All are eager to hear again a voice which they had believed to be for ever stilled in death. “My friends,” she begins, and though the voice has all the clear, ringing sweetness of yore, there is undoubtedly a tremor in it, “it would require a special language, one of which we have yet no knowledge, to convey to you the emotions which this scene of magnificent welcome awakens within me. From the bottom of my heart I thank you for it, as well as all those true and gallant friends who have created this glorious day; for next to God it is the people who have created it. In this welcome which you give to me, the humble and all too unworthy representative of a magnificent cause, the great principle of human freedom is at length recognised, that freedom inherited at birth, and only wrung from individuals by oppression and wrong. Human freedom means the right to take part in the creation of laws for the better government and perfection of man; it means that man and woman are born equal, are created to work hand in hand for the greater happiness of mankind. Hitherto this principle of mighty truth has not been recognised, with the awful results shown forth in man’s ever-increasing degradation. By the acknowledgment of this principle you have laid the train which, when fired, will put an end to immorality and social wrongs, which will make evil unpleasant to perform, and which will degrade the performer to the position of a leper, the shunned and outcast of Society, loathed and despised by his fellow-men. By the acknowledgment of this principle, a day of darkness has sunk to rise no more, and one of brightness, and promise, and fair hope has arisen to cheer us along the glorious path of reform. Much there is to be done, mountains of prejudice, and selfishness, and greed yet to be faced and conquered; but the army which the acknowledgment of human freedom has raised, is an army which will fight victoriously to the end; for it is an army in which men and women will do battle side by side and shoulder to shoulder, undeterred by class jealousies or the odious assumption of superiority by one sex over another. My friends, as I stand to-day in this Hall of Liberty and look upon this magnificent scene, memories rise up before me of a stirring and eventful past. I see before me now, a picture which in childhood I loved to imagine, a glorious reality which in the past haunted my waking dreams.