Carlile was liberally supported, and found powerful friends. The third and fourth years of his imprisonment produced subscriptions to the amount of £500 per year, and for a long period his profits over the counter were £50 per week. An idea of his occasional business may be formed from the circumstance that once when a trial was pending, Mrs. Carlile took £600 in the shop in one week. When he came from Dorchester Gaol one friend lent him £1,000 to extend his business. But he got out of money as fast as it came, and his ambition leading him to give the greatest possible effect to his advocacy, he contracted liabilities at 62, Fleet Street, which embarrassed him. Indeed, continually torn from his home by government prosecutions, he had ill opportunities of maintaining business habits. The latter part of his life was passed in the vicissitudes and anxieties of fallen fortunes. CHAPTER III. THE EDITOR AND THE ATHEIST During Carlile’s imprisonment in Dorchester Gaol, he edited the _Republican_, a Weekly Journal, which he conducted through fourteen volumes. Its circulation reached at one time as high as 15,000. He saw that a work had to be done, and he prepared to do it; if he could not do it so well as he could wish, he resolved to do it as well as he was able. He offered his ardour in the public cause as an apology for the want of a grammatical education. Drawn into authorship by the force of events, he hardly knew in what grammatical accuracy consisted, till he felt his own deficiency through the criticisms of his correspondents, some of whom did not hesitate to tell him, that he was unfit for a public writer. This state of things continued till the fourth volume of the _Republican_, where he wisely resolved to put his prison hours to educational uses.(1) But his editorial duties were his best education, and this he admitted; ‘I give,’ said he, in 1825, ‘a receipt to the criticism of my friends upon my writings for the better part of the knowledge that I now possess.’(2) Some of Carlile’s correspondents were men from whom it was an honour to receive direction. From Francis Place he gleaned all his ideas of Political Economy, and what Carlile called the ‘all-surpassing question of the regulation of the numbers of the people.’ It was from Jeremy Bentham, through Mr. Place, that he was instructed not to attempt the building of any system of his own, but to go on pulling down existing errors, every item of success in which, was in fact, so much good building.(3) In Carlile’s last days he spoke of Francis Place as ‘his old tutor who had a hard task to beat all the superstition out of him.’ 1. See Repub. vol. iv. p. 191. 2. Lion, vol. i. p. 373. 4. Christian Warrior, p. 13.