human
Mr Foote's methods had been widely and strongly disapproved of among cultured Freethinkers, including Bradlaugh; and Mr John Morley, in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, had gone to the indefensible length of justifying the prosecution, on the very inadequate ground that the _Freethinker_ had been
gpt
the public, it having been exhibited in the publisher's window in a side street. But the infamous sentence at once turned feeling the other way, though protests like Canon Shuttleworth's were needed to teach Mr Morley and other Liberal journalists that renunciation of Liberal principles is not really necessary, even in cases of persecution, to propitiate the public. Bradlaugh, on his part, took the--for him--unprecedented course of addressing a public letter to the judge, reprobating his conduct.
human
My lord,
gpt
I pen this public letter with considerable regret and much pain. I have always in my public utterances tried to teach respect for the judicial bench. I have never, I hope, allowed hostile decisions against myself personally to tempt me to undue language when exercising my journalistic right to criticise judgments delivered. My own experience of the judges of our land has, with slight exception, been that they always listened with great patience, and when disagreeing, have expressed their disagreement in a dignified manner. When I read the report of the first trial of Messrs Foote, Ramsey, and Kemp, I was inexpressibly shocked. The character of some of the evidence you admitted alarmed me, and your refusal to reserve the objection taken to the admissibility of such evidence for the consideration of the Court of Crown Cases Reserved seemed to me so extraordinary that I even now hardly dare trust myself to characterise it.... But the point that most afflicts me is the fashion in which you over and over again interrupted the defendant Foote in his defence.... There are plenty of precedents showing that prisoners have been permitted in defence the indulgence so peremptorily denied by your lordship to Mr Foote.... That you should have held the defendants in custody after the jury had disagreed, and when you had determined to again try them four days later, was mischievously and wantonly cruel. They had duly surrendered to their bail, which had been small in amount. There was no suggestion or supposition that they would try to avoid justice, nor did the prosecution ask for their detention. I am afraid, my lord, that you sent them to Newgate because they had been over-bold in their defence.... If you had meant the three defendants to have no chance of escape, if you had been prosecutor instead of impartial judge, you could hardly have done more to embarrass their defence than by sending them to this sudden and unexpected close confinement.
human
When you sat as judge in these blasphemy trials your lordship was practically omnipotent. There is yet no court of criminal appeal.... The very knowledge of your uncontrollable authority in the conduct of the trial ... should have prompted your lordship to hold the judicial balance with a steady hand, its inclining, if at all, being to the side of mercy. But your lordship, in the spirit of the old inquisitor, threw into the scale your own prejudices against the heresy for which the defendants were reputed, your own dislike of the manner in which they had made their heresies known.... I ask your lordship what would be the outcry through the civilised world if, either in Switzerland or in Hindostan, those Salvation Army propagandists who thrust their blasphemies furiously in all men's faces were so hardly dealt with as you have dealt with George William Foote, William James Ramsey, and Henry Kemp?
gpt
And all the while, the search had been made in a bank branch in St John's Wood, N.W., in the county of Middlesex, on a warrant from the Lord Mayor, whose jurisdiction was limited to the City. On this head the Lord Chief Justice indicated a very strong feeling that the Lord Mayor's warrant for such a purpose ought not to be valid anywhere.
human
Vile in its inception and dishonourable in its conduct,