to ensure a verdict of guilty. It was a foregone conclusion. The
prosecution played, "Heads I win, tails you lose."

And now a word as to our prosecutor. Nominally, of course, we were
prosecuted by the Crown; and Judge North had the ignorance or
impudence to tell the Old Bailey jury that this was not only theory
but fact. Lord Coleridge, when he tried us two months later in
the Court of Queen's Bench, told the jury that although the nominal
prosecutor was the Crown, the actual prosecutor, the real plaintiff
who set the Crown in motion, was Sir Henry Tyler. _He_ provided
all the necessary funds. Without his cash, nobody would have paid
for the summons, and the pious lawyers, from Sir Hardinge Giffard
downwards, who harangued the magistrates, the judge and the jury,
would have held their venal tongues, and left poor Religion to
defend herself as she could. And who is Sir Henry Tyler? or, rather,
who was he? for after emerging into public notoriety by playing the
part of a prosecutor, he fell back into his natural obscurity. He
remained a Member of Parliament, but no one heard of him in that
capacity, except now and then when he asked a foolish question,
like others of his kind, who are mysteriously permitted to sit in
our national legislature. Three years ago, however, he was a more
conspicuous personage. He was then chairman of the Board of Directors
of the Brush Light Company; and according to Henry Labouchere's
statements in _Truth_, he was a "notorious guinea-pig." He was
certainly an adept in the profitable transfer of shares: so much so,
indeed, that at length the shareholders revolted against their
pious chairman, and appointed a committee to investigate his proceedings.
Whereupon this modern Knight of the Holy Ghost levanted, preferring
to resign rather than face the inquiry. This is the man who asked
in the House of Commons whether Mr. Bradlaugh's daughters could not