Joseph Trust was the only person prosecuted in 1823, and the Lord Chief Justice Abbott intimated that enough had been done; but in May, 1824, there came a new rage for prosecutions from the government, when Charles Sanderson, Thomas Jefferies, William Haley, William Campion, Richard Hassell. Michael O’Connor, William Cochrane, John Clarke, John Christopher, and Thomas Riley Perry, were severally arrested, and the last nine imprisoned, through various periods, from six months to three years. Two years Mrs. Carlile was kept in Dorchester Gaol: so was his sister, a-year having been taken for her £500 fine. After this it was reported, that the Cabinet, had, in council acknowledged Carlile invincible in the course of moral resistance which he had taken, and no more persons were arrested from his shop, while no one of his publications had been suppressed. His imprisonment in Dorchester Gaol was in some respects, severe. The first magisterial order was that he should be led into the open air only as a caged animal, to be exhibited to the gaze of the passing curious, half an hour each day, or an hour every other day, or as the gaoler might be pleased. This, and similar orders caused him to pass two years and a-half in his chamber, without going into the open air. When he came to trial in 1819, he had no clear understanding of the subject of his defence, it was compiled from the pleadings of others for toleration and free discussion. In this mental state he entered Dorchester Gaol. He had taken the impression from the hint of an aged political friend, that all the evils of mankind rooted in the superstition and the consequent priestcraft practised upon them, that he resolved to devote the solitude of his imprisonment to the study of religious mysteries, and fearlessly and faithfully to make the revelation for the common good of man. His defence, on his first three days’ trial, alarmed the Emperor Alexander of Russia, who issued an Ukase, forbidding any printed report of it from being brought into his territory. His first defence was much interrupted; his second was entirely suppressed. When he was liberated from Dorchester Gaol, in 1826, the freedom of the press was complete, as far as government or aristocratical societies were concerned. His shopmen were detained to complete their sentences of three years’ imprisonment, not much to the political merit of Sir Robert Peel, who gave up not a day in either case, save that of a bad young man, who had unprincipledly intruded himself among them. To honest opposition he yielded nothing, but was, in every sense of the character, an inveterate persecutor. Though the freedom of the press was accomplished in 1829, something more remained to be accomplished, which was the freedom of public oral discussion; and on this object Carlile set his thoughts.