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My great trouble now is lest I should be unable to earn enough to meet my many heavy obligations, in which case I should be most reluctantly obliged to relinquish my Parliamentary career. He was then addressing seven and eight meetings a week, while other members were recruiting on the moors and on the Continent. The avowal, through no action of his, got into the newspapers, and was the means of setting agoing a general public subscription, the credit for starting which is due to Mr W. T. Stead, then the editor of the _Pall Mall Gazette_, whose action in the matter was chivalrous and generous in the highest degree. Another fund was opened in the columns of the _Star_, another at Northampton, another in the _Halifax Courier_, and the upshot was that in a month's time there had been subscribed close upon £2500. There were over 6000 separate donations, and the subscribers' names indicated a remarkable range of recognition. In addition to Freethinkers and Northampton friends who had helped nobly before and now helped again, there were remittances from sympathisers whose goodwill had not before been known to the subject. Sir T. H. Farrer, Lady Ripon, Mr D. F. Schloss, Lord Hobhouse (in
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), Mr Stansfeld, Mr T. B. Potter, Mr M'Ewan, M.P., Admiral Maxse, W. M. Rossetti, Auberon Herbert, Mrs Ernestine Rose, Mr Labouchere, Lord Rosebery, Mr Newnes, Lord J. Hervey, Mr Munro Ferguson, are a few of the best-known names that catch the eye in the long lists, which include thousands of signatures. A number of Churchmen and Conservatives subscribed as such, some of them largely; £200 was given by one Freethinker over an initial, and £100
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groups of workers and clerks made up sums among them; clubs collected goodly totals; widows gave their mites; and hundreds of scattered toilers gave yet again of their scanty pence to the man they believed in. At his wish, the funds were closed, as far as possible, on his birthday, 26th September, when he counted fifty-six years, _bien sonnés_. Had he allowed the subscription to continue, the amount would probably have been doubled. As it was, he paid off all his outstanding law debts, and had a clear £1000 to put towards the others; and he turned with new cheerfulness and courage to his tasks, his holiday, as usual, being of the shortest. But hard upon the great relief came a great blow, of the kind that turns good fortune to ashes. On 2nd December his daughter Alice died of typhoid fever, after sixteen days' illness, aged thirty-two. She was her father's daughter in her high spirit, in her generosity, in her energy, and in the thoroughness of her work as a student and teacher of biology, though for all her years of ungrudging service in the latter capacity there is only left to show, apart from the gain and the gratitude of those she taught, her little tract on
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Mind considered as a Bodily Function. It had been her wish that her body should be cremated; but the crematorium just then chanced to be out of order, and she had to be buried. Briefly acknowledging condolences, and replying to the request of many friends to be permitted to attend the funeral, her father wrote, to appear after it was over, the lines:
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Any public funeral would have been painful to me; and I trust I offend none in not acceding. The funeral, private and silent, will have taken place at Woking Cemetery. The funeral wreaths and flowers sent are reverently laid on the grave.