This was a sop to the friend and a sore blow dealt to the enemy. Moreover it was speedily followed up by another as swashing and trenchant in the _Morning Advertiser_ (September 15, ’85), of which long extracts are presently quoted. The journal was ever friendly to me during the long reign of Mr. James Grant, and became especially so when the editorial chair was so worthily filled by my old familiar of Oxford days, the late Alfred Bate Richards, a man who made the “Organ of the Licensed Victuallers” a power in the state and was warmly thanked for his good services by that model conservative, Lord Beaconsfield.
A phrase in the _Standard_, the “most archaic of the passages,” acted upon
like a red rag upon a rageous bull. I should rather say that it excited the so-called “Sexual Journal” by suggesting another opportunity for its unclean sensationalism: perhaps also the staff hoped to provide company and a fellow-sufferer for their editor, who was then in durance vile, his offences being “inciting to an indecent assault” and an act of criminal immorality. I should not have felt called upon to remind my readers of a scandal half-forgotten in England, while still held in lively remembrance by the jealous European world, had not the persistent fabrications, calumnies, and slanders of the _Pall Mall_, which continue to this day, compelled me to move in self-defence, and to explain the mean underlying motives.
Some three years and a half ago (June 3, ’85), the paper startled the world of London by a prodigy of false, foul, and fulsome details in the shape of articles entitled “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon.” The object of the editor, Mr. William T. Stead, a quondam teacher in the London schools and a respectable Methodist strengthened by non-Conformist support, in starting this ignoble surprise on the public was much debated. His partisans asserted that he had been honestly deceived by some designing knave—as if such child-like credulity were any excuse for a veteran journalist! His foes opined that under the cloak of a virtue, which Cato never knew, he sought to quicken his subscription-list ever dwindling under the effects of his exaggerated Russophilism and Anglophobia.