The remainder of the story is most concisely told in Mrs. Besant's own words: "Obviously annoyed at the verdict, the Lord Chief Justice refused to give judgment, and let us go on our own recognisances. When we came up later for judgment, he urged us to surrender the pamphlet as the jury had condemned it; said our whole course with regard to it had been right, but that we ought to yield to the judgment of the jury. We were obstinate, and I shall never forget the pathetic way in which the great judge urged us to submit, and how at last when we persisted that we would continue to sell it till the right to sell it was gained, he said that he would have let us go free if we would have yielded to the court, but our persistence compelled him to sentence us. We gave notice of appeal, promising not to sell till the appeal was decided, and he let us go on our own recognisances. On appeal we quashed the verdict, and went free; we recovered all the pamphlets seized, and publicly sold them; we continued the sale till we received an intimation that no further prosecution would be attempted against us, and then we dropped the sale of the pamphlet and never took it up again." [3] Having given an account of this memorable trial, we proceed to trace some of its far-reaching effects. In the first place, Dr. Knowlton's pamphlet gained immediately an enormous circulation. Before the prosecution the annual sales were very small; within three months from the time when proceedings were instituted against the publishers, 125,000 copies were sold. But this result, startling as it appears, was by no means the most important phase of the impetus given to the public mind upon the question of population by the cause célèbre of "The Queen versus Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant." During the trial the newspapers of this country contained lengthy reports of the proceedings, and the remarkable speeches of the defendants were thus carried far and wide. Their popular statements of the Malthusian position, their description of the evils arising from over-population and the remedies that they proposed were sent forth into many thousands of homes into which no hint of the truth would otherwise have penetrated. The press, with its myriad voices, became, for the time, a mighty organ of New-Malthusian propaganda, repeating, in tones that echoed round the world, the eloquent words of two social reformers to whom the miseries of the poor were known, and who had faced the danger of imprisonment and of social obloquy in order to proclaim that which they felt to be the only efficient remedy for poverty. Amidst the public excitement caused by this famous trial, The Malthusian League was called into existence, and has since carried forward the work of propaganda in an organised and systematic fashion. It was founded to promote the following objects: