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156 Mr. Saunders: Well, I will let you go.

Prisoner: But I have not done anything.

Mr. Saunders: Well, you can stay if you like.

Prisoner: I don't want to stay.

He was accordingly discharged, and left the court. It was the one instance in which he was stung into asserting his own reputation in public, and the incautious words were long remembered against him. But the whole proceedings were a substantial victory for him and his party. The right of free speech is of all the privileges of citizenship the one which the ordinary Englishman guards most jealously: and interference with that right, when it seems to encroach on customary limits, is fiercely resented by the most orderly classes. More especially is this so in London, where the police are under the direct control of the Imperial Executive, and where any suspicion that they have been used by the party in power to suppress hostile criticism is enough to shake the strongest Government. The London Radicals rallied to the defence of a threatened privilege, and letters of protest poured into the newspapers from opponents as well as friends of Socialism. Many people who took no interest in politics at all were indignant: "already," one of them wrote to the Daily News, "police interference has caused more obstruction and disturbance than twelve months of Socialistic lecturing." A weak Conservative Government was then in office: a General Election was imminent: and angry charges were made that this attack on a Socialist meeting was an insidious attempt to prepare the way for interference with open-air Parliamentary meetings. The Socialist League rose with a bound to something like popularity. The following Sunday a procession of many thousands of people, organized by the East London United