My acknowledgments are also due to the Weekly Dispatch. On my visiting London 'Publicola,' then Captain Williams, invited me to call upon him, and inform him of my position with respect to the pending trial; and his able Letters to Justice Erg-kine, after my conviction, produced great uneasiness at the gaol, and each number of the Dispatch was awaited for some weeks by the authorities around me, as I learned from the gaolers, with anxiety.
My defence, considered as a defence of the wide and momentous question of atheism, was crude enough. No one can be more sensible of that than I am. On the moral aspects of atheism and its relation to public polity I feared to enter, lest in my own newness to the study of so large a subject I should compromise it by unskilfulness of statement; I therefore confined myself to pleading that the right of public expression was the sequence of the right of private judgment—that the right of expression was consonant to the common law as well as to reason, and that the right of expression being necessary to private morality, it could not be incompatible with the public peace.
CHAPTER III. AFTER THE SENTENCE
As soon as the sentence was pronounced, I was taken to the ceils under the court. Captain Mason, the governor, said there was another prisoner to go down besides me and Adams. It was a case of felony. He said 'Would I go with him?' i replied 'I would not.' He then asked if I 'objected to go with Adams.' That I cheerfully agreed to, and, handcuffed with Adams, I walked down to the gaol. Having taken nothing since morning but a little raspberry vinegar, with which Mr. Carlile supplied me, I began to feel weak, but nothing was offered me except a little warm water, for which I asked, and this, with a very hard and bitter apple, constituted my supper. The transition from the excitement of the court to the darkness and coolness of the night-cell, made me feel as if going into a well, and my supper not serving to compose me, I continued restless till the morning.
Next day I felt so weak that I could scarcely stand upright. About twelve o'clock Mr. Bransby Cooper and the Rev. Samuel Jones came round. When Mr. Cooper saw me, he said, 'Why, Holyoake, I did not know you yesterday.'
'Why, sir?'
'You did not seem to be the same person you were before.'
'In what respect was I different?'
'Before you were so gentle and submissive, but yesterday there was so much hauteur about you.'