CHAPTER I.THE STORM BREWING.
In the merry month of May, 1881, I started a paper called the _Freethinker_, with the avowed object of waging "relentless war against Superstition in general and the Christian Superstition in particular." I stated in the first paragraph of the first number that this new journal would have a new policy; that it would "do its best to employ the resources of Science, Scholarship, Philosophy and Ethics against the claims of the Bible as a Divine Revelation," and that it would "not scruple to employ for the same purpose any weapons of ridicule or sarcasm that might be borrowed from the armoury of Common Sense." As the _Freethinker_ was published at the people's price of a penny, and was always edited in a lively style, with a few short articles and plenty of racy paragraphs, it succeeded from the first; and becoming well known, not through profuse advertisement, but through the recommendation of its readers, its circulation increased every week.
Within a year of its birth it had outdistanced all its predecessors.

No Freethought journal ever progressed with such amazing rapidity.
True, this was largely due to the fact that the Freethought party had immensely increased in numbers; but much of it was also due to the policy of the paper, which supplied, as the advertising gentry say, "a long-felt want." Although the first clause of its original programme was never wholly forgotten, we gradually paid the greatest attention to the second, indulging more and more in Ridicule and Sarcasm, and more and more cultivating Common Sense.

A dangerous policy, as I was sometimes warned; but for that very reason all the more necessary.

The more Bigotry writhed and raged, the more I felt that our policy was telling.
Borrowing a metaphor from Carlyle's "Frederick," I likened Superstition to the boa, which defies all ponderous assaults, and will not yield to the pounding of sledge-hammers, but sinks dead when some expert thrusts in a needle's point and punctures the spinal column.
I had a further incentive.

Mr.Bradlaugh's infamous treatment by the bigots had revolutionised my ideas of Freethought policy.