"The object of the National Secular Society is to disseminate the above
principles by every legitimate means in its power."

At this same Conference of Leeds was inaugurated the subscription to the
statue to be erected in Rome to the memory of Giordano Bruno, burned in
that city for Atheism in 1600; this resulted in the collection of £60.

The Executive appointed by the Leeds Conference made great efforts to
induce the Freethinkers of the country to work for the repeal of the
Blasphemy Laws, and in October 1876 they issued a copy of a petition
against those evil laws to every one of the forty branches of the
Society. The effort proved, however, of little avail. The laws had not
been put in force for a long time, and were regarded with apathy as being
obsolete, and it has needed the cruel imprisonments inflicted by Mr.
Justice North on Messrs. Foote, Ramsey, and Kemp, to arouse the
Freethought party to a sense of their duty in the matter.

The year 1877 had scarcely opened ere we found ourselves with a serious
fight on our hands. A pamphlet written early in the present century by
Charles Knowlton, M.D., entitled "The Fruits of Philosophy", which had
been sold unchallenged in England for nearly forty years, was suddenly
seized at Bristol as an obscene publication. The book had been supplied
in the ordinary course of business by Mr. Charles Watts, but the Bristol
bookseller had altered its price, had inserted some indecent pictures in
it, and had sold it among literature to which the word obscene was fairly
applied. In itself, Dr. Knowlton's work was merely a physiological
treatise, and it advocated conjugal prudence and parental responsibility;
it argued in favor of early marriage, but as over-large families among
persons of limited incomes imply either pauperism, or lack of necessary