When Vizetelly returned to his office from Bow Street on the day of his committal, he took the only course consistent with integrity. He assigned everything he possessed for the benefit of his creditors, in order that his business might be liquidated. It was impossible to carry it on any longer. The wreckers had resolved to ruin him, and had succeeded to their hearts' desire. Friends came and expressed their sympathy--among others, Sir Henry Irving, the late Sir John Gilbert, and Mr. Birket Foster--but there was virtually no opportunity for any public protest. Not a newspaper now dared to print a word on behalf of this old servant of the press whom the "Vigilants" had chosen for their victim. On the morrow of the first trial the "leader" writers had hastened to avail themselves of his plea of guilty to pass unanimous condemnation on him. The delighted "Vigilants" had promptly printed and circulated extracts from the "Times," "St. James's Gazette," "Whitehall Review," "Star," "Globe," "Morning Advertiser," "Saturday Review," "Methodist Times," "Liverpool Mercury," and "Western Morning News"; and those samples of English press opinion might have been multiplied indefinitely. They showed all parties in agreement: the Tories and the Radicals, the Puritans and the Publicans. Coote, the secretary to the "Vigilants," had become _censor morum_, and all bowed to his authority. Yet some members of this so-called "National Vigilance Association" had been mixed up in various nefarious matters. There had been, as Mr. George Moore subsequently wrote, "the case of an unfortunate foreign prince, who was dragged into court on a charge of abduction or seduction, or both; when the matter came to be sifted it was found that he was absolutely and wholly innocent. So conclusive and so unimpeachable was the evidence, that Mr. Besley, who prosecuted for the Association, had to admit that he had nothing to say, and the judge replied, 'I should think not, indeed.'"[29] Again there was a notorious Leamington case in which the "Vigilants" prosecuted, and in which, as Mr. Moore again pointed out, it was proved that two women clandestinely took an innocent girl from her employment, plied her with filthy questions, threatened her, and induced her to sign a paper which might have led to a boy of fifteen being sent to prison for two years![30]