In the last days of the month Mr Bradlaugh made an application to the Court to take the case at an early day; it was fixed for the 18th June, and shortly afterwards it became known that the Solicitor-General, Sir Hardinge Giffard, Q.C., M.P. (now Lord Halsbury) was chosen the leading counsel for the prosecutors--whoever they might be. Up to this point--the eve of one of those great forensic contests which marked various periods in Mr Bradlaugh's life--he felt that the press as a whole had not been unfair, although indeed there had been some journals coarse and foul in attack, usually on the ground of Mrs Besant's association with himself. As regards the issue of the struggle, he wrote that to predict the verdict would be worse than folly, though, "should the deliverance be against us," he urgently begged his friends to aid his daughters in keeping his journal afloat until he should be free to edit it again. Mrs Besant's descriptive accounts of the various preliminary legal proceedings are all written in a light, often jesting, vein; indeed, I am inclined to think that she hardly realised all the gravity of her situation; a true sense of the possibilities involved was perhaps somewhat obscured by the atmosphere of excitement and admiration in which she was living.
On the trial it was Mr Bradlaugh's object to show that the doctrine of the limitation of the family was to be found in many other works in general circulation dealing with economical questions; and that in medical works, many published at popular prices, and some specially intended for the use of young people, there were physiological descriptions set forth in identical or even stronger language. Amongst other witnesses Mr Bradlaugh subpoenaed Professor and Mrs Fawcett (to formally prove certain statements in Prof. Fawcett's book), Charles Darwin, the Rev. J. W. Horsley (Chaplain of the Clerkenwell House of Detention), and the Rev. S. D. Headlam--the two latter to give evidence as to overcrowding. Prof. Fawcett refused to take his subpoena, and declared he would send Mrs Fawcett out of the country rather than that she should appear as a witness in the case. A second attempt was made to induce him to take the subpoena in a friendly way, but he again refused, putting his hands behind his back so that the paper should not be surreptitiously put into them--of which he need have had no fear. Charles Darwin wrote his thanks for the courtesy of the notice, saying:--