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By Root 1184 0

Russell finally joined those Britons in prison. As their excuse, authorities seized on a few sentences in an article in the No-Conscription Fellowship's Tribunal, where Russell predicted that the American troops now starting to arrive in England and France might be used as strikebreakers, "an occupation to which the American Army is accustomed when at home." In court, the prosecutor claimed that this passage would have a "diabolical effect" and interfere with relations between Britain and a key ally. "A very despicable offence," thundered the judge, and sentenced Russell to six months. When he arrived to begin serving his time, Russell wrote, the warder taking down his particulars "asked my religion and I replied 'agnostic.' He asked how to spell it, and remarked with a sigh: 'Well, there are many religions, but I suppose they all worship the same God.'"

Officials were so awed by Russell's intellectual stature and aristocratic lineage that, alone among British war resisters, he was allowed to be a "First Division" prisoner—an ancient, privileged status that permitted inmates to keep the tools of their trade, which for him were pen, books, and paper. He was allowed to receive the Times and to have books, flowers, and fruit sent in from outside, and was assigned an extra-large cell and a fellow convict to clean it for him at sixpence a day. Russell had a lively and unconventional love life, and, evading the limits on correspondence, was able to smuggle out letters to two women he was involved with, all the while still nominally married to a third. A set of letters to one lover, a young actress, were in French, which he knew his guards would not be able to read; Russell convinced them that these were historical documents copied from his research materials. A letter to another woman he slipped inside the uncut pages of the Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, telling her the volume was more interesting than it appeared. The actress sent him love notes through the "Personals" column of the Times, until Scotland Yard caught on after a "many happy returns" message appeared on Russell's birthday. One of Thomson's sleuths showed up to question her. Always self-disciplined, Russell wrote four hours a day, producing, among other work, 70,000 words of his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy.

Outside prison walls, mounted police broke up a rally in London's Finsbury Park in the midst of a speech by Charlotte Despard. And the authorities were particularly eager to shut down the NCF's Tribunal, which had long been an impertinent voice against the war's madness. Reluctant to tarnish Britain's free-speech image by banning the paper outright, they tried other methods.

At the National Labour Press, where the Tribunal was printed, the police arrived and dismantled the press machinery. The paper switched to a new printer, which was soon raided, and found its presses damaged too. Produced on a small hand press, the paper promptly reap-peared as a one-page leaflet with the triumphant headline "Here We Are Again!!" When the two men who operated this press ran out of type for the large capital letters used for headlines, they borrowed them from friendly fellow printers on Lord Northcliffe's rabidly prowar Daily Mail. For months to come, moving once or twice because of suspicious neighbors, this secret press continued to print the paper, although distribution difficulties—the police were watching the mail—greatly reduced its circulation. Basil Thomson's men never found it.

Trying to figure out where the Tribunal was being printed, agents twice raided the NCF, and watched the office constantly. An impoverished-looking woman with a baby carriage who visited the building every few days, apparently hoping for a handout, never attracted their attention. She was smuggling proof sheets of the Tribunal beneath the blankets of her carriage. Indeed, as one after another of the NCF's male leaders had gone to prison for defying the draft, women had become the organization's backbone. Catherine Marshall, a talented organizer and suffrage movement