long terms of penal servitude. A violent article appeared in the next issue of the Commonweal, declaiming against the Home Secretary, the Judge, and the Inspector of Police who had conducted the case, and asking if such men were fit to live. The authorities were weary of this perpetual recurrence of what was on the face of it incitement to murder, and determined to make an end of it once for all. C.W. Mowbray and D.J. Nicoll, the former registered as printer and publisher, the latter as proprietor, of the Commonweal, were arrested a few days later. When tried on the criminal charge, Mowbray, who asserted that he had disapproved of the particular article in question, and was able to prove that he had taken no active part in the publication of the Commonweal for two or three months back, was acquitted; Nicoll was convicted and sentenced to eighteen months' imprisonment. This was the end of the Commonweal, and with it of the last remnants of the Socialist League.
By that time Morris was too busy with other things to be deeply concerned; nor had the treatment he had received from his unfortunate colleagues been such as a patience not absolutely inexhaustible could survive. One allusion to the matter is preserved in his correspondence. Writing to his daughter on the 21st of April, 1892, "You will be sorry to see," he says, "that Nicoll and Mowbray, two of our old comrades, have got into trouble with the Commonweal. It was very stupid of Nicoll, for it seems that he stuck in his idiotic article while Mowbray was away, so that the latter knew nothing of it. I think Mowbray will get off. I am sorry for him, and even for the Commonweal."
While therefore Morris's withdrawal in November
