But they were won at such heavy cost of physical strength and of money, that they undermined his strength and burdened him heavily with debt.

For all this time he had not only to fight in the law courts and to attend scrupulously to his Parliamentary duties, but he had to earn his living by lecturing and writing, so that his nights away from the House were spent in travelling and his days in incessant labour.

Many of his defeated foes turned their weapons against me, hoping thus to give him pain; thus Admiral Sir John Hay, at Wigton, used language of me so coarse that the _Scotsman_ and _Glasgow Herald_ refused to print it, and the editor of the _Scotsman_ described it as "language so coarse that it could have hardly dropped from a yahoo." August 25th found me at Brussels, whither I went, with Miss Hypatia Bradlaugh, to represent the English Freethinkers at the International Freethought Conference.

It was an interesting gathering, attended by men of world-wide reputation, including Dr.Ludwig Buechner, a man of noble and kindly nature.

An International Federation of Freethinkers was there founded, which did something towards bringing together the Freethinkers of different countries, and held interesting congresses in the following years in London and Amsterdam; but beyond these meetings it did little, and lacked energy and vitality.