"I had no wish to become a martyr to the cause, but I felt that I should make the most of any chance to publicise our views. We were not so innocent as to fail to see that our imprisonment would cause a certain stir. We hoped that it might create enough sympathy for some, at least, of our reasons for doing as we had done to break through to minds hitherto untouched by them. We had obtained from our doctors statements of our recent serious illnesses which they thought would make long imprisonment disastrous. These we handed over to the barrister who was to watch our cases at Bow Street. No one we met seemed to believe that we should be condemned to gaol. They thought the Government would think that it would not pay them. But we, ourselves, did not see how they could fail to sentence us to gaol. For some time it had been evident that our doings irked the Government, and the police had been raiding the Committee office and doing a clumsy bit of spying upon various members who frequented it. The barrister thought that he could prevent my wife's and my incarceration entirely. But we did not wish either extreme. We instructed him to try to prevent our being let off scot-free, but, equally, to try to have us sentenced to not longer than a fortnight in prison. In the event, we were each sentenced to two months in gaol, a sentence which, because of the doctor's statements, was commuted to a week each."

Quote Details

Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Added on April 10, 2026
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English

Sources

Ch. 16: Trafalgar Square, p. 609

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Autobiography_of_Bertrand_Russell