Our appeal, we decided, must be made to the Nation. Letters had previously been written by us during the autumn of 1869 to every member of both Houses of Parliament, and to many leading men, lay and ecclesiastical. To all these letters we received only some half-dozen responses which were at all sympathetic. We received others which contained only a strong denunciation of my own and other women's action in the matter. These latter came in some cases from highly esteemed Dignitaries in Church and State, several of whom, I am grateful to acknowledge, wrote to me some years afterwards in a wholly different tone.

Having received so little encouragement from the persons whom we had vainly imagined would have taken an interest in the question, we turned to the working populations of the Kingdom. Here our reception was wholly different. I am well aware that the working classes have their faults, and that neither they nor any other class of men are wholly free from the taint of egotism; but of one thing I am profoundly convinced, and that is, that when an appeal is made to the people in the name of justice, they will in general respond in the truest and most loyal manner.