~ 
 
 Ex Libris 
 C. K. OGDEN 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 Life-Stokies of Famous Men 
 
 CHAELES BEADLAUGH
 
 ISSUED FOR THE 
 
 RATIONALIST PRESS ASSOCIATION, 
 
 LIMITED
 
 AC.KI) is 
 
 1'rcuitispiece
 
 Life-Stories op Famous Men 
 
 CHARLES BRADLAUGH 
 
 BY 
 
 J. M. ROBERTSON 
 
 London : 
 
 WATTS & CO., 
 17 JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.4. 
 
 1920
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PREFATORY NOTE 
 I. JUVENILE PREPARATION 
 II. SOLDIER AND CIVILIAN 
 
 III. ANTI-RELIGION - 
 
 IV. POLITICS - - - - 
 V. ADVENTURES AND CONFLICTS 
 
 VI. NEO-MALTHUSIANISM - 
 VII. PARLIAMENTARY STRUGGLE - 
 VIII. CLOSING YEARS - 
 
 IX. INFLUENCE AND PERSONALITY 
 
 TAGH 
 
 vi 
 
 1 
 
 13 
 
 21 
 35 
 48 
 57 
 66 
 100 
 113 
 
 ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 AGED d8 
 
 PRIVATE, 7TH DRAGOON GUARDS' 
 AGED 20 - 
 
 AT THE BAR OF THE HOUSE 
 
 AGED 57 
 
 1991897 
 
 Frontispiece 
 
 Facing p. 1G 
 „ 70 
 „ 112
 
 PREFATORY NOTE 
 
 An authoritative life of Charles Bradlaugh, by his 
 .laughter, Mrs. Bradlaugh Bonnor, was published in 
 1895, the present writer adding chapters on Bradlaugh's 
 political and religious opinions, and a record of his 
 Parliamentary Struggle. To that biography the reader is 
 referred for fuller details and references where the present 
 short sketch is of necessity lacking. 
 
 As Bradlaugh's life was one of battlo, it has been 
 necessary, even in a short account, to indicate the 
 missiles which were employed against him. Hence 
 a special atmosphere of controversy. But that belongs 
 to the whole story, and to have tried to escape it would 
 have been to falsify history. 
 
 J. M. E. 
 
 VI
 
 JUVENILE PREPARATION 
 
 EVEN the complacent generation which has so confidently 
 indicted the Victorian age for all manner of shortcomings, 
 ethical and aesthetical, is not wont to claim that its own 
 public men, commonly so called, excel their predecessors 
 in moral stature. A certain massiveness and an enduring 
 energy mark out whole rows of " platform men " between 
 1837 and the century's end. Committed by their circum- 
 stances to a grim succession of struggles, they were 
 formidable fighters, defiant, unyielding, yet in the main 
 without rancour, as is demanded by the best ideals of 
 their race. Certainly not to them can we plausibly 
 apply Mill's description of his age as lacking in convic- 
 tion. As little did they incur the other reproach, also 
 cited by Mill with approval as widely deserved, of 
 indulging in " the deep slumber of a decided opinion." 
 For their opinions they battled with all the tenacity 
 that their countrymen ever exhibited in physical war. 
 And of all the long line none was more largely compact 
 of courage and force, and none more defiant of common 
 prejudice, than the "notorious" heretic, Charles 
 Bradlaugh. 
 
 Born on September 26, 1833, in the same year with 
 Gordon, he had his upbringing in the early years of 
 reformed franchise, under the shade of the Corn Laws, 
 in a London in which only one bridge, the oldest, was 
 free of toll. Slavery was abolished in the British Empire 
 in the year of his birth ; but between low wages, unem- 
 
 1
 
 2 JUVENILE PREPARATION 
 
 ployment, and dear bread the lifo conditions of masses 
 of the British pooplo, especially the peasantry, wero 
 chronically worse than they had been a hundred years 
 before. Tho boy's lot was not of the worst, but it was 
 not an easy one. Charles Bradlaugh, senior, born in 
 London of a stock long settled in Suffolk, 1 was confi- 
 dential clerk to a firm of lawyers at two pounds a week, 
 upon which he had to bring up a family of five children, 
 of whom Charles junior was the eldest. To send the 
 boy to school from his seventh to his twelfth year was 
 thus a creditable effort on the father's part in tho 
 circumstances. The little house in which he was born, 
 in Bacchus Walk, Iloxton, has latterly been swept away 
 to make room for a State school : in those days, and for 
 a generation after, there were none such save the poor 
 " national " schools of that ago. At twelve Charles junior 
 became errand-boy in the office in Cloak Lane in which 
 his father was clerk. Primary schooling determines 
 whether a man is or is not to be illiterate ; after that 
 his culture depends more or less on his bent and build ; 
 and the boy Bradlaugh contrived in two years of errand- 
 running to lay or trace the foundations of tho legal 
 knowledge which was to make him in his maturity, by 
 professional admission, " the greatest lay lawyer in 
 England." Also ho began reading omnivorously at the 
 second-hand bookstalls, having no access to anything in 
 tho shape of a public library, but saving all the coppers 
 he could from omnibus fares and tolls to buy books of 
 his own. To run round by London Bridge when he 
 might have walked or ridden over another was his mode 
 of thrift. As a child, stirred by the talk around him, he 
 had solemnly invested one halfpenny in tho purchase of 
 
 1 The name, which in this form is very rare, appears to be an 
 early variant of "Bradley."
 
 JUVENILE PREPABATION 3 
 
 a copy of The People's Charter, l)ufc was not thereby 
 diverted much from the proper pursuits of his age. 
 About the same time, instructed by some elder, he read 
 in his father's copy of Cobbett's Political Gridiron. But 
 while he was in all ways predestined to politics, his 
 master faculties determined for him a conjoint activity 
 which was to make his life a warfare on earth. 
 
 At the age of fourteen, too poor to buy the book, he 
 had copied out for himself parts of Emerson's lecture on 
 Self-Beliance. Doubtless they included the sentence : 
 " Trust thyself : every heart vibrates to that iron string." 
 His did, till his dying day ; and he was soon to begin to 
 live up to the great monition. His father, in those days, 
 never went to church, but had no anti-religious views, 
 and duly sent his children to Sunday school, already the 
 well-established provision for relieving English parents 
 of their religious responsibilities and securing domestic 
 quiet during some part of the day of rest. The boy 
 Charles was a diligent and promising pupil, and at the , 
 age of fifteen had been promoted to the status of Sunday 
 school teacher, in accordance with the inexpensive 
 educational principle introduced by Joseph Lancaster in 
 1798, whereby pupils became teaching monitors as soon 
 as they knew their rudiments. 
 
 The presiding clergyman, Mr. Packer, of St. Peter's, 
 Hackney Road, directed him, as one of his best pupils, 
 to prepare himself for confirmation by the Bishop ; and 
 it was on this prompting that the boy set about his first 
 critical study of the Gospels and the Thirty-nine Articles. 
 With his little schooling, he was notably precocious. 
 At fourteen he had passed from the status of errand-boy 
 to that of wharf clerk and cashier to a firm of coal 
 merchants at a salary of eleven shillings a week ; and 
 already his brain was active. He had had no critical 
 guidance, heterodox or other, but with his keen natural
 
 4 JUVENILE PEEPAEATION 
 
 oye for evidonce ho found certain contradictions, and he 
 respectfully wrote to ask his pastor for light. The 
 latter, being of the "stand no nonsense" school, promptly 
 wrote to the boy's fathor to inform him that his son 
 showed atheistical leanings, and at the same time 
 suspended the youth for three months from his teaching 
 functions. The sequel is memorable. Driven from 
 Sunday school and branded as atheistical, the boy, aged 
 about fifteen, shrank from church, and very naturally 
 betook himself on that now leisured day to the neigh- 
 bouring Bonner's Fields, where there already went on 
 at that period many of thoso open-air discourses and 
 discussions on politics and religion which to this day 
 constitute a feature of tho Sunday life of the London 
 parks. So far from being an atheist, he was still warmly 
 devoted to the religion in which he had for years been 
 trained, and, born debater as he was, stood up in its 
 defonce against some of the shrewd polemists of the 
 fields. With one of them, James Savage, a cool and 
 sarcastic reasoner of considerable culture, he debated on 
 the inspiration of the Bible ; and the freethinker, wiser 
 in his generation than Packer, courteously confuted his 
 juvenile antagonist to the point of convincing him that 
 the dogma in question was not rationally tenablo. 
 
 Even then the boy did not turn atheist, but took the 
 normal step into deism, which had been the creed of 
 ninety English freethinkers in every hundred for a 
 century past. But the zealous Packer contrived that he 
 should not halt. Having reached the deistic stage, tho 
 youngster, still amicably anxious for discussion with his 
 pastor, submitted to his attention a copy of the Dicgesis 
 of the Rev. Eobert Taylor, a freakish work of which tho 
 discursive and wholly undigested learning was beyond 
 the power of either the boy or his pastor to estimate ; 
 and the latter, after his manner, took fresh repressive
 
 JUVENILE PEEPARATION 5 
 
 measures. Already he had induced the alarmed parents 
 to confront their boy with appropriate scriptural texts 
 hung on the household walls. The fact that Charles 
 had become an ardent teetotaller confirmed the pastor 
 in his conviction that the heretic was going to the devil. 
 Once, finding the lad's name on a poster-board at the 
 door of a freethinkers' meeting-place announcing some 
 discussion, he induced the much-perturbed father to 
 remove it under cover of darkness — a proceeding which 
 had swiftly to be reversed. Now he persuaded the father 
 to notify the boy's employers that he would withdraw 
 his pecuniary security if within three days the lad did 
 not alter his opinions ; and Packer for his own part 
 conveyed to the offender the ultimatum that he must 
 at once recant or lose his situation. In later life Brad- 
 laugh took the charitable view that the threat had 
 been intended to terrify him, not to expel him from his 
 home ; but the self-respecting boy, determined not to 
 live in idleness on his father, on the third day packed 
 up his little belongings, parted from his devoted sister 
 Elizabeth with tears and kisses and a keepsake which 
 she treasured till her death, and left his father's house. 
 
 The father, a reticent man of conformist character, 
 made no attempt to call him back ; the mother, a disci- 
 plinarian person, was equally static. He lived close at 
 hand for some time, making, to their knowledge, a very 
 poor living ; and, doubtless feeling that they had hatched 
 a strange portent, under the clergyman's advice they let 
 him go his own way. How he derived from them his 
 manly and genial nature is one of the mysteries of 
 heredity ; but one can trace in them at least something 
 of his pertinacity. Never in after life did he say an 
 undutiful word of either of them, his recollections 
 mainly taking the form of an affectionate memory of the 
 many times when his father and he, getting up at three
 
 6 JUVENILE PREPARATION 
 
 iu the morning, walked throo miles to fish in the river 
 Lea boforo they went to fcheir oJUco-work together. 
 
 In effect expelled from home by the strategy of Parson 
 Packer, the boy, getting temporary hospitality from an 
 old Chartist nearly as poor as himself, set to work to 
 make a living as a middleman in the coal business, getting 
 orders, with payment in advance, and drawing the trade 
 commission. The juvenile enterprise might have grown 
 in such hands to a sufficiency; but the "religious 
 difficulty " again supervened. His best customer was 
 the wife of a baker, who treated him kindly ; but one day, 
 " from information received," she launched the thunder- 
 bolt : " Charles, I hear you are an infidel ! " and the most 
 diplomatic efforts failed to turn the conversation to the 
 price of coals, the good lady closing their connection with 
 the shuddering pronouncement : " I should be afraid that 
 my bread would smell of brimstone." Thus assisted to 
 take a critical view of the practical effects of Christianity, 
 the young polemist, with all his signal good humour, duly 
 procoeded to develop himself, on very inadequate physical 
 rations, as a speaker and debater on the problems which 
 had so rudely disturbed his existence. For that task 
 his sustenance was better than might now be supposed. 
 At that stage he hardly knew what his opinions were ; 
 but he was in a very fair way to develop them. 
 
 An amiable remark by Mr. A. S. Ileadingley in his 
 short Life of Bradla/ugh, published in 1880, has given 
 extended currency to a view set forth long before by 
 compunctious Christians — the opinion, namely, that but 
 for the unenlightened persecution of Packer the youth 
 who had in his twenties come to be known as " Icono- 
 clast " would probably have remained in the Christian 
 fold. Headingley proceeded partly on Bradlaugh's own 
 observation, in an ironical dedication of a pamphlet to 
 Packer in 1861, that but for that cleric's action he might
 
 JUVENILE PREPARATION 7 
 
 not have "proceeded so far" on the path of freethought. 
 He meant that he might not have taken to the platform. 
 But this is not to say that he might have remained 
 orthodox. To go to that length is to add unwarrantably 
 to the quite sufficient official blame that justly attaches 
 to an ecclesiastic who is biographically remembered 
 solely for his relations with the young Bradlaugh. A 
 boy who of his own force could at the age of fifteen, 
 while zealously acting as a Sunday-school teacher, 
 detect incompatibilities in the Gospels and the Articles, 
 was not likely to remain long uninfluenced by the more 
 stringent indictment of the current creed which was 
 going on around him. English freethought, which began 
 to take systematic critical form in the Discourse of Free- 
 thinking of Anthony Collins in 1713, and is recorded by 
 responsible witnesses to have reached the working 
 classes even in the age of the Restoration, became 
 a matter of platform propaganda as early as Peter 
 Annet, in 1739. If such polemic was overlaid in the 
 latter half of the eighteenth century by new popular 
 politics, it was powerfully reconstituted by Paine's Age 
 of Reason, which seems to have been about as widely 
 circulated as his Rights of Man ; and the Radicalism of 
 the first half of the nineteenth century went hand in 
 hand with all manner of freethinking. The movement 
 of Robert Owen was impregnated with it ; and no one 
 who mingled long with the Chartists could fail to meet 
 with it there. 
 
 But it had a literature of its own. Richard Carlile, 
 who took up the sale of Paine's works when they were 
 being officially suppressed, and who underwent nine 
 years' imprisonment between 1819 and 1835, was one 
 of the most energetic of democratic publishers, putting 
 in cheap circulation a multitude of English, French, and 
 American treatises, with Shelley's Queen Mab, of which
 
 8 JUVENILE PREPARATION 
 
 the jurisprudence of the timo refused to let the poet 
 control the circulation. An almost continual succession 
 of Radical and Rationalist journals, mostly of book-page 
 size, had pushed such literature home during a quarter 
 of a century. Meantime there had appeared in 183S 
 Charles Ilonnell's Inquiry Concerning the Origin of 
 Christianity , praised by Strauss, of which the sober 
 documentary scrutiny was promptly assimilated by the 
 popular propagandists. In 1846 came George Eliot's 
 translation of Strauss's Life of Jesus. 
 
 If all this could conceivably have failed to affect a 
 mind like that of Bradlaugh in the fifties, it is quite 
 inconceivable that he could have remained unmoved in 
 adolescence by the retrospect of the brutal persecution of 
 freethinking heresy. Of him it could be said as truly as 
 it has been said of Voltaire by Lord Morley, that cruelty 
 and injustice wore not merely offences against his prin- 
 ciples : " they were knives to his heart." A lawyer by 
 instinct, he loathed to see law made the tool of iniquity ; 
 and the awakening of his political faculty, which must 
 have occurred had Packer been Dean Stanley, would 
 have done more to make him a freethinker by rousing his 
 wrath on behalf of the victims of official bigotry than did 
 his own lightly taken sufferings at the hands of one 
 priest. 
 
 For the rest, half the Church of England about 1850 
 consisted of Packers and men ready to acquiesce in their 
 action, while of the other half the bulk were indifferent, 
 leaving but a small fraction concerned to give any 
 meaning to the Christian doctrine of love. Protest from 
 clerics against the persecution of freethinking publicists 
 in those days is hardly to be traced. 
 
 It is perhaps fair to suggest that the savage persecu- 
 tion inflicted on the plebeian publishers of Paine's works 
 and their shopmen, and on such publicists as Houston,
 
 JUVENILE PBEPARATION 9 
 
 Carlile, Wedderburn, Taylor, Southwell, Hetherington 
 and G. J. Holyoake, was inspired at least as much by 
 political as by religious feeling. The absurd doctrine 
 that the French Revolution was wrought by religious 
 freethought was then devoutly believed by the mass of 
 nominally educated men, and fiercely affirmed by such a 
 historian as Lord Mahon, afterwards Earl Stanhope. 
 For such angry sciolists, every freethinking book was a 
 menace to the social order. Deistical freethinkers com- 
 plained that the atheists who outwent them, from 
 d'Holbach onwards, created a special hostility to free- 
 thought in general; but the political doctrines of the 
 devoutly theistic Paine and the republicanism of Richard 
 Carlile probably counted for much more in the common 
 prejudice. The same panic fear of revolution blew the 
 bellows of malice against Shelley. On the other hand, 
 the fact that the prosecution of Paine's publishers and 
 others was largely carried on by the so-called Society for 
 the Suppression of Vice, of which the pious Wilberforce 
 was president, is one of the standing proofs of the power 
 of religion to vitiate character. The persecutors seem 
 never to have asked themselves whether their professed 
 doctrine of forgiveness of enemies had anything to do 
 with their actual lives. 
 
 The freethinkers, untouched by the hypocrisy of their 
 foes, certainly returned blow for blow so far as words 
 went. When invectively smitten on one cheek, they 
 smote all the moral features of the assailant without 
 stint; and the Infidel's Text-Booh of Robert Cooper 
 (1846), a collection of thirteen lectures on the Bible, is 
 pungent reading. But the whole succession were 
 singularly law-abiding. It is due to them to record that 
 they saved the intellectual liberties of their country by 
 their unyielding fortitude, "each stepping in his 
 comrade's place the instant that he fell," from the days
 
 10 JUVENILE PREPARATION 
 
 when men and women filed up to sell Paine's books, 
 under certain penalty of imprisonment, to those in which 
 bigotry, sick of the struggle with an unsubduable breed, 
 sullenly drew back its bruised hand. Were it not for the 
 long crusade of the men of the people, the publication in 
 English of the works of Hennoll and Strauss, and even 
 of Colenso, would not have been possible at the time of 
 their composition. The fighters won freedom for the 
 scholars. 
 
 Into their line the young Bradlaugh stepped, so to 
 speak, by social and personal predestination, the circum- 
 stances deciding his destiny. Faithful as they to the 
 rule of law, he cared as quixotically as they for the 
 promulgation of truth against perceived falsity. Denied 
 a livelihood by pious prejudice, the boy, hungry but 
 unembittered, soberly cast about for a resort compatible 
 with non-surrender to the incredible creed. Precocious 
 lecturing could not avail him, though he met with ready 
 kindness from comrades. Austin Holyoake became his 
 attached friend ; and the more famous brother, George 
 Jacob Holyoake, took the chair for him at a lecturo 
 which undertook to grapple with the " Past, Present, and 
 Future of Theology," in October, 1850. In those days 
 he began to learn Hebrew with James Savage, who had 
 begun his conversion from the faith, communicating his 
 knowledge on the Lancastrian principle to another ; 
 studied French with another friend ; and picked up also 
 a little Greek, Latin, and Arabic. The brave and 
 worshipful widow of Richard Carlile gave him cordial 
 hospitality from her poor store ; and he duly fell in 
 juvenile love with her daughter Hypatia, who, being still 
 younger, duly laughed at her boy adorer. Concerning 
 that episode, as concerning his life in general, pious 
 malice as duly framed vile libels. Other hospitalities, 
 planned to give him visibly needed meals, alarmed his
 
 JUVENILE PREPARATION 11 
 
 self-respect ; and tiny debts, accumulating, weighed upon 
 his spirit, till at length, at the officially recorded age of 
 17tV," he took the Queen's shilling and became a 
 soldier. Even in enlisting he met with oppression, 
 which he characteristically resisted. He had expressly 
 enlisted for service in India, for which there was offered 
 a bounty of £6 10s. — enough to pay his debts and leave 
 thirty-five shillings over. But the sergeant of the East 
 India Foot had made a deal with a sergeant of the 
 50th Foot, and the gaunt recruit found himself disposed 
 of as a chattel. Making vigorous protest, he won the 
 interest of the examining medical officer, who explained 
 that he might compromise by choosing any other English 
 regiment he liked. Honour being thus saved, he elected, 
 at sight of a smart cavalryman, to be one of the 7th 
 (Princess Eoyal's) Dragoon Guards, then stationed in 
 Ireland. 
 
 The news, reaching the home, drew the father to 
 Westminster, where he obtained permission for the 
 recruit to spend Christmas Day with his family, thus 
 happily putting the grace of reconciliation over the 
 breach. Father and son were not to meet again. 
 Charles senior, grown a moody man, became a regular 
 church-goer, gaining thereby no visible comfort ; and in 
 1852 died after a few days of sudden and unexplained 
 illness, aged forty-one. His employers inserted in the 
 Times a notice to the effect that he had faithfully served 
 them for upwards of twenty-two years. For himself, he 
 had written articles on Fishing, thought worthy of 
 reprinting about forty years after his death, and a number 
 of small things in the London Mirror. But, save for the 
 element of stedfastness, the perceptible heredity, as 
 aforesaid, is small. 
 
 There was another brother, William Robert, twelve 
 
 c
 
 12 JUVENILE PREPARATION 
 
 years younger, who was the mother's favourite. Educated 
 at an Orphan Asylum, he had the usual religious training, 
 and he was never a Freethinker ; but he contrived to 
 lose one after another the situations which his brother 
 found for him, and took to drinking, entirely neglecting 
 his mother to the day of her death. About the end of 
 1872 he was sent to jail for embezzling small sums from 
 his then employer ; and Charles, who had harboured him 
 during a long convalescence, now supported his wife, and 
 aided him after his release, with very scant funds of 
 his own. In 1875 William " found salvation " at 
 the meetings of Messrs. Moody and Sankey, and 
 employment on the Christian Herald. Later he figured 
 much as a Christian Evangelist, often lecturing in the 
 same town and on the same day as his brother, making 
 much capital of their relationship, inviting prayer on 
 Charles's behalf, and professing much Christian love for 
 him, to the edification of the devout. In private he 
 spoke of Charles with mendacious malice, living all the 
 while and running a worthless religious journal on the 
 strength of support earned by his relationship and his 
 unctuous profession of piety. On these matters the elder 
 brother always maintained a stoical silence ; but the 
 facts must be put on record in the interests of veridical 
 biography. As a lecturer, William has been described 
 as a bad caricature of Charles — the body without the 
 mind. He thus enters into the heredity problem.
 
 II 
 
 SOLDIEE AND CIVILIAN 
 
 Bradlaugh'S second large adventure in life began on 
 the plane of rude comedy. He arrived at the transport 
 ship for the passage to Dublin in the decayed black suit 
 and silk hat of his frustrate vocation as a lecturer, 
 doubtless by way of parting definitely with that attire ; 
 and he completely succeeded. The hat was promptly 
 disposed of by his fellow recruits, who next proceeded to 
 break open his box. Finding there a Euclid, a Greek 
 lexicon, and a small Arabic vocabulary, they employed 
 those articles and the hat in a miscellaneous game of 
 football, from which the smallest volume alone was 
 retrievable. Sea-sickness morally stilled the scene ; but 
 there ensued a storm so violent that the sea-sick and 
 other recruits were besought by the alarmed captain to 
 help him to move his cargo, on a promise of £5 for the 
 party. The aid was by them successfully given ; but 
 when the storm was weathered the captain (whose 
 nationality is not recorded) nefariously proposed to 
 compound for his salvation by a few half-crowns to the 
 more active men. Then, to the amazement of all, the 
 pallid hobbledehoy of the ruined hat and lexicon, who had 
 worked with the rest, found his sea-legs ; and a broadside 
 of declamation fitted for Trafalgar Square, ending with 
 an awful threat to write to the Times, reduced the 
 appalled and conscience-stricken mariner to speechless 
 surrender. The hobbledehoy had at one stroke made 
 good his footing, and at once received the grateful and 
 penitent homage of his mates. 
 
 13
 
 14 SOLDIER AND CIVILIAN 
 
 Barrack life in a cavalry regiment made a man of the 
 overgrown and underfed boy. He was then a devoted 
 teetotaller, and his comrades, bracketing that weird 
 peculiarity with his no less strange addiction to books, 
 dubbed him 'Leaves." When, taking duty one day 
 as cook, he served up the potatoes in an unsoftoned 
 form, they pelted him with his produce. From time to 
 time he had to fight, like another ; and the first verdict 
 of the experts, on the occasion of his thrashing a bully, 
 was that it was a bad thing to come in the way 
 of Leaves's fists, but it was your own fault if you got 
 there. In due course he became sufficiently proficient 
 in that as in other forms of polemic. To mention that 
 the regiment was once stationed near Donnybrook, at 
 Fair time, is to convey that it learned to use the 
 shillelagh. The requisite challenge from the natives 
 was circulated in adequately offensive form ; and sixteen 
 picked men of the Seventh, of whom Bradlaugh (6ft. liin.) 
 was the shortest, got a day's leave to see, and feel, the 
 fun of the Fair. They simply fought their way from 
 end to end, guarding their heads with their left arms 
 and reciprocating with the right. The results, in his 
 case, included a recurring susceptibility to erysipelas in 
 the loft arm. 
 
 In other matters Leaves was somewhat of a ringleader. 
 The regiment was wont at one period to attend Rathmines 
 Church, where one Sunday a Rev. Mr. Halpin preached 
 a sermon in which he unadvisedly suggested that his 
 thought might transcend the capacity of the rank and 
 file. Leaves was naturally incited by his sensitive 
 comrades to send a letter of critical retaliation, for the 
 production of which he was only too well qualified. On 
 the following Sunday the Seventh went prepared for 
 further hostilities ; and as soon as the hapless preacher 
 proceeded from preliminaries to fresh impoliteness, at
 
 SOLDIEE AND CIVILIAN 15 
 
 a signal, three hundred dragoons unhitched their sabres 
 and let them clash on the floor. The moral sensation 
 was proportionate, and only the advent of the Duke of 
 Cambridge for a review at Dublin next day averted 
 punitive consequences for Bradlaugh. At Ballinco'llig 
 he got into and out of another scrape. A landlord had 
 closed a genuine right-of-way against soldiers and 
 peasants ; and Leaves, after proper legal inquiry, headed 
 a party of both orders, who broke the gate, leaving on 
 one of the bars the inscription : " Pulled up by Charles 
 Bradlaugh, C52, VII D.G." The landlord made com- 
 plaint to the commanding officer, who unsympathetically 
 advised legal consultation, seeing that C52 generally 
 knew what he was about ; and there was no sequel save 
 grateful supplies of dairy and other produce from the 
 local users of the right-of-way. 
 
 Such a constitutionalist was not unapt to collide at 
 times with military rule ; and Bradlaugh had some sharp 
 experience. In one case, when a bullying officer was 
 having him arrested for contemptuous disregard of orders 
 in his capacity of orderly room clerk, he escaped only 
 because the officer had the honesty to repeat, at Brad- 
 laugh's suggestion, the offensive terms in which he had 
 given his commands. The colonel, agreeing with the 
 private that " there must have been some mistake," 
 dismissed the case. A martinet captain made matters 
 hard for Bradlaugh afterwards ; and in his autobiographic 
 sketch, in 1873, expressing his lasting gratitude to his old 
 colonel, the victim avowed that he had " not yet quite 
 forgiven " his captain. But in 1889, when he lay danger- 
 ously ill, a certain general called at his lodging to leave 
 the message that " his old captain " had inquired about 
 him; and the sick man cast away all the old resentment. 
 Curiously enough, the colonel was then reported to have 
 veered into hostility. It is said that in his soldiering
 
 16 SOLDIEE AND CIVILIAN 
 
 'teens the youth had been helped to bear up under 
 bullying by the friendship of James Tbomson (" B.V."), 
 who was tben army schoolmaster at Ballincollig. The 
 two very different natures, then diverging considerably in 
 opinion, formed a close friendship, which lasted twenty-five 
 yoars. The poet, it may be, steadied his friend under 
 discipline. 
 
 It is to be avowed that at some points his observance 
 of discipline was not strict. Not only did he often lecture 
 on temperance to his comrades in the barrack-room at 
 night, ho confesses in his brief autobiography to have 
 more than once broken out of Portobello barracks to 
 deliver teetotal speeches in the small French Street Hall, 
 Dublin. Many times have I spoken there in my scarlot 
 jacket, between James Haughton and the good old Father, 
 the Rev. Dr. Spratt, a Roman Catholic priest, then very 
 active in the cause of temperance." When, later in life, 
 medical authority put restraint on his tea-drinking, and 
 indicated light wines as for him the safer beverages, he 
 forfeited some of the esteem he had won from devoted 
 abstainers, as against theological odium. 
 
 In his three years of soldiering in Ireland the lad so 
 learned the rights and wrongs of agrarian life there as 
 to become the faithful friend of the Irish cause, under 
 circumstances which would have made most men 
 renounce it. In later life he drew a vivid picture of 
 a hideous eviction scene of which, as a soldier, he was 
 an impotent witness. It served to fix his vocation for 
 politics ; and when, in 1853, after his father's death, 
 a small inheritance from an aunt made it possible for 
 the widow to pay, as the testator had wished, the 
 requisite £30 for his discharge, he was glad beyond 
 measure to return to civil status. The adjutant's 
 certificate ran that his conduct had been " extremely 
 good." To the new adventure in life, happily, he
 
 PRIVATE, 7TH DRAGOON GUARDS. AGED 20 
 
 Facing p. 16
 
 SOLDIER AND CIVILIAN 17 
 
 brought a powerful physique, well toughened by his 
 army training for a career that was to need a very 
 strong man's energy, and a mind ripened in many ways. 
 But in the photograph taken of him in his regimentals 
 in 1853 he is still a mere chubby-faced lad, with all his 
 inches. 
 
 He at once sought employment, but found it hard to 
 obtain ; and the unloving mother did not spare comment. 
 At length he found work with a solicitor, who said he 
 had no clerkship vacant, but mentioned that he needed 
 an office boy. The tall ex-trooper promptly offered to 
 take that post, of which the salary was ten shillings 
 a week, and he was accepted, the employer being a man 
 of some judgment. In three months' time it had been 
 raised to fifteen ; in nine months the boy was in full 
 charge of his employer's Common Law business at a 
 salary of £65. The signal skill in all law procedure which 
 he showed in his later public life was thus acquired 
 by doing actual solicitor's work in the lower courts 
 for a number of years. But the capacity which earned 
 such swift promotion was another matter. The employer 
 was so far above the average that when ardent Christians 
 wrote in the usual way to warn him of the freethinking 
 activities of his clerk, who had resumed lecturing, he 
 paid no heed beyond stipulating that the business should 
 not be allowed to suffer from the propaganda ; and by 
 lecturing under the nam de guerre of " Iconoclast " 
 Bradlaugh kept the bargain. In his twenty- second year 
 he married, having added to his office salary by becoming 
 clerk to a Building Society. After four years he asked 
 to have his articles, and, not being met, made an arrange- 
 ment with another solicitor, who, however, got into 
 ruinous money difficulties and involved Bradlaugh in 
 them. Yet another attempt to become articled was 
 made by him in 1862 ; but this attempt also came to
 
 18 SOLDIER AND CIVILIAN 
 
 nothing after two years, the solicitor concerned having 
 to give up business. 
 
 Between his bias and his luck, he was ultimately held 
 to the stony path of his first choice. Sometimes he was 
 headed away from it. In 1858 he became President of 
 the London Secular Society, in succession to G. J. 
 Holyoake, and also became editor of the Investigator, 
 a freethought weekly which had been conducted by 
 Robert Cooper. Within a year he had to give it up 
 by reason of ill-health and pecuniary difficulties. It was 
 at this period (1859) that ho became a Freemason, as 
 attested by the official certificate. In 18G0 he started 
 his National Reformer on a company basis, with a 
 co-editor who gave him much trouble ; and in 1863 ill- 
 health caused him to devolve that task ; but the death 
 of his substitute, John Watts, brought him back in 1866, 
 when he became President of the newly-established 
 National Secular Society. In the intervening period, 
 and afterwards, he strove to enter on more lucrative 
 lines of life, without dropping either his advanced politics, 
 home and foreign, or his advanced propaganda on religion. 
 But his commercial schemes in the end failed. Attempts 
 to get into city business by running a "Naples Colour 
 Company," and in other ways, were brought to an end 
 by the " Black Friday " of the failure of Overend Gurney 
 and Co. in 1866, and the difficulties which followed for 
 years. On every line of such effort he found himself 
 more or less handicapped by his crusade against religion. 
 Some boycotted him ; some seemed to have found in his 
 heresy a special provocation to cheat him. But it is 
 reasonable to infer that the crusader, with all his super- 
 abundant energy, lacked some of the forms of patience 
 and application needed for success in business. He gave 
 to his mental and public life much of the time and 
 thought that the business man gives to making money ;
 
 SOLDIEE AND CIVILIAN 19 
 
 and a predilection for the establishment of truth in 
 doctrine and justice in politics is not in itself conducive 
 to gain in commerce and finance. As he once avowed, 
 he had great capacities for making money, and also great 
 capacities for losing it. In 18G7 he brought an action 
 against the English Joint Stock Bank, then being wound 
 up, for £12,000, agreed to bo paid to him by the general 
 manager, for negotiating the purchase of a Norwich 
 banking business for £210,000. Vice-Chancellor Wood, 
 expressing the highest sense of the plaintiff's honesty 
 and ability, regretfully found that there was " no com- 
 pleted agreement that could be enforced." For once the 
 lay lawyer's vigilance had failed him. 
 
 None of the vulgar vices played any part in his com- 
 mercial unsuccess. The teetotaller was an affectionate, 
 home-loving husband and father ; and though in his 
 early years of marriage his gift of friendship meant a 
 large hospitality for his means, it was not thriftless. 
 But the fates barred that path too. The marriage had 
 promised as well as youth could wish, the wife being an 
 affectionate, amiable, loyal and cordial helpmate ; and 
 James Thomson was for long years a housemate, loved 
 by all the family. The crusader had thus for a time his 
 share of happiness amid his struggles. But it was in 
 the destinies that wife and friend should severally be 
 sundered from him by the curse of dipsomania. In the 
 wife's case it ultimately meant the complete wrecking of 
 the home, debts on that score coinciding with losses in 
 business and in propaganda work. Immediately on that 
 catastrophe came the death of the only son, aged eleven, 
 a boy of great promise. The unhappy mother, a physical 
 wreck, went to live with her two girls at Midhurst in the 
 house of her father, a veteran Badical, teetotaller, and 
 freethinker, devoted to his son-in-law. To the end, in 
 her broken spirit, she warmly loved alike children and
 
 20 SOLDIER AND CIVILIAN 
 
 husband, and for some years the two girls spent alternate 
 months with him in his poor lodgings in East London, 
 he continuing to visit at Midhurst till all hope was 
 gone. Where women were concerned, he was the most 
 forbearing of men ; and in the tragedy of his married 
 life he was quite blameless. Thomson's case will be 
 considered in another chapter. 
 
 It was long part of every-day religious apologetic, as 
 against Bradlaugh, to say that he had been drummed 
 out of the army ; that he had deserted his wife and 
 children ; that he had caused his mother to die of a 
 broken heart ; that he was not married, and that his 
 children were illegitimate. For his wife's sake he had 
 been duly married in church. One Anglican clergyman 
 at Tottenham, the Eev. Hugh McSorley, fatuously 
 supposing Bradlaugh, then a Tottenham resident, to be 
 the author of a skit in Dickens's All the Year Bound, in 
 which the reverend gentleman was recognizable for his 
 neighbours, published in a local newspaper a " rejoinder " 
 in which the atheist's wife was described as his squaw, 
 united by a bond unblessed by priest or parson." 
 But that," the reverend gentleman went on, "has an 
 advantage : it will enable him to turn his squaw out to 
 grass, like his friend Charles Dickens, when he feels 
 tired of her " Bradlaugh had no connection what- 
 ever with Dickens, with whom he was thus memorably 
 bracketed, and had had nothing to do with the skit in 
 Dickens's journal. Abstaining as usual from the tempta- 
 tion to use the horsewhip, he exacted from the newspaper 
 proprietor and the parson long and explicit apologies 
 (evidently dictated by him), which were printed by the 
 former in his journal. McSorley further paid £100 
 (which went, minus costs, to charities), and was per- 
 mitted to remain anonymous, a privilege of little local 
 value, but useful as enabling him to continue anonymous
 
 SOLDIER AND CIVILIAN 21 
 
 attacks on Bradlaugh, to the latter's knowledge, in other 
 quarters. Yet Bradlaugh never published his name. 
 
 There are doubtless many clerical and other Christians 
 who will now regard with disgust the doings of those 
 militant Christian contemporaries of Bradlaugh, even in 
 the case of McSorley, who really supposed he had a 
 grievance, to say nothing of the multitudes who, with 
 no shadow of personal grievance, gleefully circulated all 
 manner of villainous libels on the strength of simple 
 hearsay. But it is historically important to realize that 
 all this was then in the ordinary way of orthodoxy. It is 
 strict truth to say that the normal course of defence for 
 belief" against unbelief was to resort instantly to gross 
 personal aspersion. What Packer did to the boy, millions 
 of his fellow believers did to the man. To ruin the 
 heretic financially, further, was generally felt to be an 
 appointed way of doing God service, ordinary Christians 
 being 
 
 quite persuaded 
 That all the apostles would have done as they did. 
 
 While private malice thus energized, the law of the 
 land operated to the freethinker's undoing. In 1867 he 
 had to bring an action, in his then capacity of dealer in 
 bills of exchange, against one Du Bin, and was met by 
 a deliberate attempt to burke his evidence on the score 
 of his holding atheistic opinions. The dispute turned on 
 the place of delivery of certain bills, and at the second 
 stage his evidence was refused. A few days later, called 
 as a witness in the Central Criminal Court in a libel 
 action, he objected to swear, and was at once allowed to 
 give evidence on affirmation ! Yet again, in the next 
 stage of his own suit, he was sent back to be sworn as 
 to the refusal of his testimony before he could argue his 
 point. In the end, after two years of litigation, he won 
 it, Lord Chief Justice Cockburn remarking that the
 
 22 SOLDIER AND CIVILIAN 
 
 defendant had no merits in the case, and had relied on 
 a " somewhat unrighteous " pica. But the Christian 
 defendant went bankrupt, so that the atheist lost his 
 debt of £3G0 and his costs— £150. The Evidence 
 Amendment Act of 1869 was passed in view of the legal 
 confusion the case had revealed ; but Bradlaugh had no 
 compensation. 
 
 The most piquant aspect of the matter is that the 
 religious generation which thus fought one who, without 
 malice towards believers as such, criticized their creed 
 and their Sacred Books, found its best avowable weapon 
 in a charge against him of coarseness and excessive 
 violence of language. It was quite false ; his attack was 
 amenity itself in contrast with the defence. Journal 
 files, books, and pamphlets can supply the test. The 
 plain fact was that all open criticism of a creed 
 irrationally and ignorantly held was spontaneously felt 
 to be " blasphemous," and blind anger at once took 
 charge of the proceedings. Some people are still so 
 intellectually confused as to argue that he who rigorously 
 criticizes a creed and its books has shown himself 
 intolerant," and so earns just persecution. It is there- 
 fore still necessary to explain that intolerance, rationally 
 defined, consists in malice against persons because of 
 their opinions, not in (a) hostility to opinions or doctrines 
 as such, or in {b) strictures upon any because of their 
 actions as such. The most stringent criticism of his 
 own doctrines and opinions never awoke in Bradlaugh 
 a spark of malice. It was doubtless trying to ill- 
 disciplined believers to see the " inspired " ethics of 
 their " revealed " books mercilessly exposed in their 
 manifold deformities, and the structure of fable and 
 documentary fraud made bare ; but that was the 
 inevitable sequence of their own tactic. If the believer 
 were content honestly to stick to the problem of truth
 
 SOLDIER AND CIVILIAN 23 
 
 of record and doctrine, he would have spared himself the 
 exposure of the historic sins of his Church. 
 
 It is open, of course, to the dispassionate onlooker, 
 hight Gallio, to say that Bradlaugh know what he was 
 doing when he chose to be a life-long crusader against 
 established creeds. He knew how religions did fight, 
 and he challenged one to combat. It is quite true. An 
 avowed republican, Malthusian, and heretic, he had 
 before him the record of the life of Richard Carlile, who, 
 flying those colours, spent nine years in jail for doing so. 
 He knew he could wield legal weapons which Carlile 
 had lacked ; but he knew also that he entered on a path 
 which meant no ease ; and if the suffering outwent any- 
 thing he had anticipated he never whined. Through all 
 he loved his own land, thought it the best, and never 
 reviled it. Even in the matter of criticism of English 
 shortcomings he never indicted it as Mill habitually did : 
 seeking to make England freer, he knew she was nearer 
 freedom than the continental peoples whose rebels he 
 helped and befriended. His course was, in a word, that 
 of one who, inheriting as his national birthright a great 
 ideal and a great tradition, strove intensely to move his 
 countrymen to live up to their best standards.
 
 Ill 
 
 ANTI-RELIGION 
 
 Questioned towards the close of bis life as to his 
 retrospective view of the total expediency of his crusade 
 against religion, Bradlaugh lightly said something to the 
 effect that if he were to begin over again he might not 
 take up his position on the house-tops. It was an 
 avowal of the common doubt of an ageing fighter, 
 conscious of having wasted much strength, as to whether 
 he might not have used it more economically, with much 
 more ease and lucre for himself. Of course it lay in the 
 nature of the man and the case that he simply could not 
 in his pioneer days see things in that light. To have 
 been a prudential propagandist or non-propagandist he 
 would have had to be " hatched over again and hatched 
 different," though, as he told Packer, the latter was his 
 determinant in taking the first and decisive plunge. 
 Bradlaugh spent himself in assailing alike religious 
 delusion and political injustice because they were alike 
 repellent to his mind, morals, and temper. But in his 
 last years, when he so rapidly won new popularity 
 without recanting anything, he cannot have failed to 
 wonder sometimes whether he might not have got more 
 solid satisfaction out of life by devoting himself to money- 
 making, popular politics, and fishing, and keeping his 
 opinions to himself. Men who have taken a course like 
 his can perhaps best realize, on retrospect, the possi- 
 bility of the doubt. The question once put to him 
 in the House of Commons smoking-room by a genial 
 
 24
 
 ANTI-RELIGION 25 
 
 Conservative Q.C. — " Good God, Bradlaugh, what does 
 it matter whether there is a God or not?" — was one 
 which he did not seek seriously to answer, and its point 
 was by him humorously appreciated. 
 
 A Rationalist who broadly contemplates the planet as 
 a pin-cushion studded with a billion fanes, of which the 
 individual creeds, upon collation, constate the utter 
 futility of all, may fitly ask himself whether it is the 
 course of prudence to kick against that infinity of pricks. 
 If it is in the nature of the mass of men collectively to 
 be more rabidly certain of the absolutely unknown, in 
 all manner of absurd representation, than they take the 
 trouble to be over anything knowable outside of the 
 daily round, the thoughtful egoist might intelligibly 
 decide to leave them alone. Those who nevertheless go 
 about to expose in whole or in part the delusion as they 
 see it — the Voltaires, the Paines, the Bradlaughs, and 
 their followers — do so because of their altruism, their 
 humanitarianism, their craving to enlighten their fellows. 
 They reckon, of course, that the enlightenment will 
 make for better life all round. It is a postulate of all 
 freethinking that it makes at once for political freedom, 
 for quicker advance in knowledge, and for better conduct. 
 
 Bradlaugh's work for freethought was thus the 
 counterpart of his work in politics. Like Voltaire and 
 Paine, he sought to inform the plain man : his main 
 audience was among the British working folk and the 
 intelligent, as distinct from the scholarly, middle classes. 
 Unlike the other two, he was mainly a man of the plat- 
 form, where his most signal endowment gave him an 
 unmatched power. The great mass of his writings are 
 pamphlets which condense lectures or courses of lectures ; 
 and in the writing he never thought of giving a literary 
 habiliment or embellishment in place of the shining 
 armour of vivid oratory with which he had clothed them
 
 26 ANTI-RELIGION 
 
 in delivery. The pamphlets, though occasionally 
 humorous, were penned to give an enduring hasis to the 
 impression wrought by the spoken word. In sheer 
 Titanic oratorical power he was quite unequalled in the 
 England of his day. In the bulk of his writing he was 
 content to be a working pamphleteer. But in 1877 ho 
 and Mrs. Besant produced a Freethinker's Text-Book in 
 two parts, of which he did the first, divided into two 
 sections: "Man: Whence and How?", "Religion, 
 What and Why?"; and thence may be gathered his 
 general philosophy of things. The first section dealt 
 with the Biblical cosmology, anthropology, and zoology, 
 opposing to them the results of modern science, which 
 on this side he had studied with all the zest given to tbe 
 problem by freethinkers in the sixties and seventies. 
 
 Some readers at the present day, when even popular 
 Christianity is to a large extent grown in effect Unitarian 
 and " unscriptural," would doubtless demur to the pre- 
 liminary position, taken from the orthodox Sir William 
 Jones, that " Either the first eleven chapters of Genesis, 
 all due allowance being made for a figurative Eastern 
 style, are true, or the whole fabric of our national 
 religion is false." But the eclectic Christians of to-day 
 should remember that in that period most of their co- 
 believers really held the historic Christian' faith, and 
 either believed or wanted to believe in the Bible records 
 which they had received as supernaturally revealed truth, 
 and which are still so imposed upon the young in the 
 schools by the connivance of many who know them to be 
 fabulous. Bradlaugh and his co-workers actually 
 wanted to deliver the masses from what they held to be 
 demonstrated delusion as to the history of the world and 
 mankind. At the same time they attacked, in their later 
 and more philosophic form, the beliefs in deity which had 
 been established for the modern world by the fabulous
 
 ANTI-EELIGION 27 
 
 records, but which the philosophers strove to recast in 
 more or less complete disregard of the Biblical present- 
 ment. The section on Religion is a closely and exactly 
 reasoned discussion of Christian theistic philosophy, 
 drawing on many writers on both sides, down to the 
 latest anti-theism made current in the Westminster 
 Bevieio. In sum, it exhibited the design argument as a 
 mere non sequitur, and ontology as a chimera. 
 
 Bradlaugh's own atheism was simply the logical com- 
 pletion of Spinoza's pantheism, concerning which, in a 
 masterly lecture on Spinoza, he declared that he diverged 
 from that great thinker at the point at which he 
 " ascribed mode to the infinite" ; and a capable Scottish 
 clergyman who heard the lecture pronounced that 
 Bradlaugh's position was logically reached on Spinoza's 
 premises. Heine called pantheism a " timid atheism." 
 Bradlaugh would never have applied the disparaging 
 adjective to Spinoza, whose memory he revered as that 
 of a great truth-lover ; but he knew very well that the 
 pantheism which Heine himself finally put in the 
 formula, " God is all there is," came logically to the 
 same thing as atheism. Holding that the term God," 
 when thus employed, is a mere denaturalization of the 
 concepts attached to it by the vast 'majority of all who 
 have ever used it, he was incapable of taking shelter 
 behind the word. Some people who watched his 
 immensely skilful use of legal technique in his many 
 legal struggles accused him of readiness to quibble. In 
 simple fact, he used law as the trained lawyer does, 
 fighting by the received rules as he played chess. But 
 he never regarded philosophy as a game of chess. He 
 was not a " philosophical sceptic," like the Montaigne of 
 the Apologie, or the Pascal of the Pensies, or Bishop 
 Huet, or Mr. Balfour : he built not on Hume but on 
 Spinoza ; and it is remarkable how little use he makes of
 
 28 ANTI-RELIGION 
 
 the greatest of British philosophers. One of his first 
 published essays was a tract on Descartes, which he 
 contributed to a serios entitled " Half-Hours with Free- 
 thinkers," Descartes being for him memorable in that 
 aspect no less than as the philosophical starting-point of 
 Spinoza. Hume perhaps ropelled him by his tempo- 
 rizing attitude to theism ; though neither is Descartes 
 invulnerable in respect of his conformities. Starting 
 from Spinoza, Bradlaugh became a modern Monist, and 
 his atheism is summed up in the proposition that theism 
 is dualism, against which atheism and not pantheism is 
 the honest negative for purposes of sincere debate. 
 
 It ought not to be difficult now for any thinking man 
 to realize the meaning and the grounds of atheism, 
 though there is still an infinity of unintelligent comment 
 on the term. When freethinkers in the eighteenth and 
 previous centuries realized the incredibility of " revela- 
 tion " as such and of the Christian legend, they normally 
 fell back on deism, which is in no philosophic sense 
 different from theism so-called, save insofar as modern 
 theism strives to adjust itself to modern science. That 
 is to say, they took for granted, with Bacon, that the 
 universe is "not without a mind"; that it must have 
 a Moral Governor, and must have had a Creator. It 
 was not till science had somewhat opened up the infinite 
 cosmic vistas that such conceptions ceased to seem the 
 obvious verdict of common sense. Voltaire and Paine, 
 vehement theists both, so held it ; and it was the modern 
 perspective, no less than philosophical logic, that enabled 
 Bradlaugh and many of his contemporaries to discard 
 altogether the anthropomorphic solution which is the 
 root or essence of all religion. They did not, as conven- 
 tional orthodoxy supposes, proceed to find the Cosmos 
 totally intelligible as a mere " mechanical process," ruled 
 by " chance." They had learned, from Hume, or other-
 
 ANTI-EELIGION 29 
 
 wise, that " chance " is an utterly meaningless expression 
 in reference to the universe of things, and they had seen 
 that " mechanical " is a term of dialectic trickery. For 
 them the universe was a much more stupendous thing 
 than it had been for the religious mind, primitive, 
 Hebrew, Pagan, or Christian ; and it was as an incon- 
 ceivably stupendous All that they saw it to be utterly 
 incompressible into theistic formulas, even when these 
 had been stretched from the barbaric Hebraic into a 
 Newtonian wording. They put aside theism not because 
 they did not find the universe a mystery, but because 
 they found theism a merely childish attempt to explain 
 the mystery ; an attempt, too, involving a perpetual 
 clash between morality and theology, even when the 
 latter is detached from the sacred books. 
 
 In and since his day, many men holding substantially 
 the same positions, and choosing to avoid the popular 
 odium attaching to the term " atheism," have made use of 
 the label of Agnosticism, 1 invented by Huxley. Some of 
 those who prefer that denominative have indicated the 
 opinion that it involves a position logically different from 
 Bradlaugh's ; but this is a logical confusion. One of the 
 current verbalisms on the subject, put in currency by 
 J. S. Mill's account of his father's views, is that 
 " dogmatic atheism " is as untenable as theism. But 
 " dogmatic atheism " is a mere countersense. It is an 
 ignorant blunder to describe the educated atheist as 
 saying " There is no God." The full title of Bradlaugh's 
 philosophic section is " Keligion : What and Why? or 
 God = X." As he said a hundred times, to "deny the 
 existence of God " is to be meaningless. What he did 
 was to deny the existence of any one of the alleged 
 
 1 This in turn evoked from Christian wit the comment that 
 Agnostic = Ignoramus .
 
 30 ANTI-KELIGION 
 
 beings that had been described to him in definitions of 
 the term " God." As he pointed out, every theist denies 
 the existence of the beings alleged in all definitions save 
 his own : the athoist simply rejects one definition more, 
 arguing that every one in turn posits or involves a con- 
 tradiction in terms. In the popular phrase, the latest 
 theist " denies the existence " of a million Gods so-called: 
 the atheist " denies the existence " of the million plus 
 one. The very phrase is an inane petitio principii, and 
 as such Bradlaugh always disclaimed and repudiated it. 
 
 In the opinion of some of us, his procedure at this 
 point compares favourably with that of Spencer, who, 
 writing his First Principles, as he avows, to forestall 
 hostility on the score of " materialism," misrepresented 
 atheism in order to repudiate it, yet never succeeded 
 in escaping denunciation as godless and materialistic. 
 Atheism, according to Spencer, professes to explain the 
 universe. If this characterization applies to any historio 
 form of atheism, it certainly does not apply to Brad- 
 laugh's, which expressly affirmed that the universe, being 
 held infinite, cannot be explained. That is, in sum, the 
 position of the agnostic, who, however, is prone to claim 
 that he merely says " I don't know," and that the atheist 
 goes further. It is not so. The agnostic, unless he is 
 merely making an autobiographical avowal without 
 pretence to a philosophic doctrine, implicitly says to 
 the theist, " You don't know " — " your alleged knowledge 
 is wholly imaginary." Which is just atheism. 
 
 Part of the self-excusal of those religious and other 
 persons who stood aside unsympathetically or anti- 
 pathetically from Bradlaugh's great parliamentary 
 struggle took the form of the plea that he had 
 gratuitously earned hostility by taking up his " extreme " 
 position and by using extreme language. But the ortho- 
 dox people who, arguing thus, suppose that if they had
 
 ANTI-RELIGION 31 
 
 lived in his day they would have discriminated between 
 him and "moderate" heretics, "know not what spirit 
 they are of." In Bradlaugh's youth, language of the 
 grossest opprobrium was used by instructed men against 
 all theists who ever so temperately impugned the 
 received Biblical beliefs. Hugh Miller, himself accused 
 of " infidelity " for believing in geology at all, called the 
 theists and politicians who outwent him " vermin " and 
 'reptiles," and described as "degraded and lost" those 
 who accepted the evolution doctrine put forward before 
 Darwin by Robert Chambers in his Vestiges of Creation. 
 Yet there was not a shadow of irreverence in Chambers. 
 Whewell tells in a letter of the " contempt and abhor- 
 rence with which Owen and Sedgwick speak of the 
 Vestiges." Contempt and abhorrence, in fact, constituted 
 the average Christian attitude towards the mere opinion, 
 independently of the mode of its expression. For Chris- 
 tian professors, as for the Hoxton baker's wife, anything 
 "infidel" conveyed a smell of brimstone. 
 
 When, then, Lord Morley, in his admirable Life of 
 Gladstone, inserted in his curt account of Bradlaugh the 
 odd sentence, " Blank negation could go no further," he 
 conveyed, if any clear impression at all, a mistaken one. 
 Lord Morley, with his high mastery of his mother 
 tongue, has probably realized long ago that the " blank " 
 of his sentence is a blank cartridge of diction. It might 
 at a pinch serve to characterize allusively his own pro- 
 cedure in spelling " God" with a small "g" throughout 
 his brilliant work on Voltaire. Despite his somewhat 
 cryptic aspersion of the deism of the eighteenth century 
 in the mass as " godless," his typographical device 
 seemed open to only one interpretation — to wit, that the 
 God of current belief is as strictly a fabulous figure as 
 the Gods of the heathen, to whom Christians deny the 
 capital letter. That, if anything, might be called a
 
 32 ANTI-EELIGION 
 
 " blank " negation, in the sense of the phrase " a blank 
 denial," a negative without explanations. Bradlaugh 
 could not well " go further " than his critic, but his 
 method was in comparison discursive, ratiocinative, and 
 expository, and he always used the capital G. He had, 
 as Lord Morley avows, " a strong love of truth according 
 to his lights," his lights being tho necessary measure of 
 his perceptions, as Gladstone's and Lord Morley's and 
 everybody else's lights are tho measures of theirs. 
 Bradlaugh, however, had sought light on religion and 
 philosophy rather more strenuously and employed it not 
 less competently than did any of his contemporaries 
 whose lives were largely devoted to politics. His meta- 
 physic, though much sounder than Spencer's, like that 
 of greater thinkers was open to criticism ; and some of 
 his friends dissented from it at points. But the facile 
 assumption of some, " unexercised and unbreathed " in 
 the dialectic conflict, that Bradlaugh was unqualified 
 because of the nature of his career, is one of the 
 fallacies of academic self-complacency. To Lord 
 Morley's summary there may fitly be made the adden- 
 dum that Bradlaugh was a far more competent thinker 
 on the main philosophic problem than nine out of ten of 
 his colleagues in Parliament. The late Professor Flint 
 was probably more familiar than Lord Morley with the 
 intricacies of the theistic debate, and it was after being 
 criticized by Bradlaugh that he wrote : — 
 
 There is an impression in some quarters that 
 atheism is advocated in a weak and unskilful manner 
 by the chiefs of Secularism. It is an impression 
 which I did not share. Most of the writers who 
 are striving to diffuse atheism in literary circles are 
 not to be compared in intellectual strength with 
 either Mr. Holyoake or Mr. Bradlaugh. 1 
 
 1 Anti-Theistic Theories, 4th cd., p. 517.
 
 ANTI-RELIGION 33 
 
 As a monisfc he was necessarily a deterniinist, like 
 Hobbes, Locke, Hartley, Hume, and the German philo- 
 sophers who admit the scientific necessity of that view 
 while framing incogitable verbal formulas to ' save the 
 face " of popular morals, supposed to be endangered by 
 the philosophic truth. Bradlaugh knew his fellow-men 
 too well to believe that morality is to be advanced by 
 abracadabras ; and he composedly faced the vituperation 
 that has formed the bulk of the intuitionist answer to 
 determinism, from Butler's day to ours. That vitupera- 
 tion proceeds in equal disregard of the fact that 
 Augustine, Calvin, Luther, and Knox were theological 
 determinists, and of the patent truth that the normal 
 belief in a meaningless " free-will " counts for less than 
 nothing in the average of conduct. Bradlaugh, accord- 
 ingly, was accused of undermining morals by the same 
 theologians who execrated him for pointing out, with 
 Reimarus and Voltaire, that the Bible puts forward, in 
 the person of David as "the Psalmist," the worst model 
 of human conduct ever set up as divinely approved. 
 There is something astonishing, on retrospect, in the 
 undeviating unreason with which the champions of 
 " revelation " in those days defied every form of rational 
 criticism of their positions ; flouting alike the challenge 
 of philosophy and that of simple good sense craving for a 
 better ethic than that of the sacred books. The next 
 generation of ecclesiastics was to find something like 
 safety in the Higher Criticism, which reduced their sacred 
 books to supposititious and interpolated documents, 
 subject accordingly to discrimination and rectification. 
 But it was mainly for representing those very documents 
 as fallible human compositions that Bradlaugh was by 
 their predecessors so well hated. 
 
 To-day, doubtless, many will explain that Bradlaugh 
 and his work ought not to be termed anti-religious. It
 
 34 ANTI-EELIGION 
 
 has been the experience of some later freethinkers to 
 be told by tolerant Christians or thoists that they are in 
 reality very religiously minded, by which it is meant that 
 they are disinterested, honest, and earnest. But it is 
 not for amiable sentiment to determine the current value 
 of words. For Bradlaugh, as for exact thinkers in 
 general, religion meant supernaturalism, as it did for 
 Comte till he saw fit to invent a so-called religion of his 
 own. Those who will may fight over the counters ; the 
 historic torm will still suffice for those who care to 
 record the realities of the strife.
 
 IV 
 
 POLITICS 
 
 In Bradlaugh's youth, popular politics ran much to 
 drastic constitutional reconstruction. The establishment 
 of the American and French Eepublics by revolution had 
 evoked in England no serious revolutionary movement : 
 revolution would have been especially difficult had it 
 been tried, precisely because the country had a system of 
 representative government ; but for the same reason the 
 reformers were not revolutionary, however advanced 
 were their doctrines. The reforms they demanded were 
 to come through Parliament. So savage was the reac- 
 tion against the French Eevolution, however, that the 
 simple reform of the English franchise, which had been 
 agitated for before 1789, could not be even imperfectly 
 effected till 1832, and then with immense difficulty. 
 Under even that settlement, nine electorates with 
 165,000 voters returned twenty members, while ten 
 pocket boroughs with 2,600 voters in all returned as 
 many. Inevitably the republican rationalism of Paine 
 and his successors held its ground among the ill-paid, 
 ill-fed, and unenfranchised workers ; and the Chartist 
 organization, which did not profess republicanism, 
 pressed a programme of six points of theoretic constitu- 
 tionalism — equal electoral districts, manhood suffrage, 
 the ballot, annual parliaments, payment of members, and 
 abolition of the property qualification. Formally insti- 
 tuted in 1838 by the Working Men's Association, the 
 movement for the People's Charter virtually collapsed in 
 1848. 
 
 35
 
 36 POLITICS 
 
 All this had happened before the boy Bradlaugh set 
 foot on his life's main path. An attempt made in 1850 by 
 Holyoake and others to combine the disrupted Chartist 
 leaders into a new organization came to nothing. There 
 remained on the scene the voluntary Socialism of Robert 
 Owen, dubbed pre-scientific by the pseudo-scientific 
 Marxians of the next half-century. In that movement 
 Holyoake had been a missionary ; and upon its inspira- 
 tion he afterwards laboured for the building-up of co- 
 operative trading, which has since grown to such signal 
 dimensions. Bradlaugh, realizing, as so many political 
 Radicals of his day did, the Utopian character of Owen's 
 ideal, while highly honouring the great old optimist, 
 turned to political Radicalism, with republicanism as 
 ultimate political objective. As early as 1859 he was 
 noted, in the agitation against the futile Reform Bill 
 proposed by the Government in that year, as " a youth- 
 ful orator who seemed a great favourite with the noisier 
 Democrats " at a great London meeting, reported by the 
 Times. That propaganda he vigorously continued, 
 combining it, however, with an enthusiastic advocacy of 
 republicanism for a good many years. This too was 
 relatively Utopian, for one who came to be in a very 
 high degree a practical politician. In England 
 republicanism is an ideal for the young ; and in 
 Bradlaugh's youth it was bound up on the one hand 
 with the Paine tradition and the political and personal 
 disrepute of the third and fourth Georges, and on the 
 other with sympathy for the French republican push of 
 1848 and detestation of Napoleon III. If Bradlaugh 
 could fairly be charged with over-violence of language in 
 any direction, it was in his Impeachment of the House of 
 Brunsivick ; in which connection his attitude is best to 
 be understood by remembering how the Conservative 
 Thackeray spoke in The Four Georges, and that George
 
 POLITICS 37 
 
 Eliot in her youth wrote of the fourth as "that royal 
 hog." Towards Louis Napoleon Brad laugh always 
 avowed a bitter animosity ; lo sang cle mes amis, he 
 quoted, Mait sur son time. Again it is to bo remembered 
 how Swinburne, in 1873, could exult that " the Dog 
 is dead." There were well- hated emperors before 
 Wilhelm II. 
 
 Bradlaugh in those days was much associated with 
 movements for freedom abroad. Mazzini, the theist, 
 whom he met in 1859, was one of his heroes ; and for 
 the Italian cause he laboured personally, carrying letters 
 for Mazzini from Italy when his Italian business venture 
 took him there. In 1870 Mazzini took the Prussian 
 side, and Bradlaugh the French, and they never met 
 again. In 1860 Bradlaugh delivered a series of lectures 
 in aid of Garibaldi, which yielded a hundred guineas ; 
 and among the few letters he preserved was one from the 
 Italian hero thanking him for his services. In the 
 American Civil War his sympathies were all for the 
 North ; and we have his testimony, as well as that of 
 Herbert Spencer, to the fact that the feeling of the great 
 mass of the English people went the same way, despite 
 a contrary impression on the part of many Americans 
 who attended only to the attitude of the English 
 aristocracy. 
 
 Bradlaugh's work for the Italian cause had been done 
 in the teeth of organized Catholic opposition, which 
 enlisted, for purposes of physical violence, many Irish 
 labourers, chorussing for "God and Eome"; but in 
 home politics he remained warmly sympathetic with 
 Irish nationalism, as with that of Italy and Poland ; and 
 men who afterwards were to be indicted as Fenian 
 leaders sought his advice at a certain juncture. The 
 details of that episode, however, he abstained from 
 publishing when he wrote of it in 1873 ; and he did not
 
 38 POLITICS 
 
 later break silence. All that he privately conveyed was 
 that he drafted a Proclamation of the Irish Republic 
 for the " Provisional Government " in 1867 ; but that it 
 was altered after leaving his hands. In 1868 he wrote 
 in a pamphlet on the Irish Question that, holding 
 republicanism to be the bost form of government, he yet 
 thought the people of England and of Ireland still " too 
 much wanting in true dignity and independence, and too 
 ignorant of their political rights and duties," to make 
 good republicans. Forcible separation he pronounced 
 quite impracticable ; and he expressly disclaimed belief 
 in revolutions effocted only by arms. He was, neverthe- 
 less, systematically shadowed by the police at that 
 period. His constant public appeal, in the face of the 
 passion aroused by the Manchester and Camber well 
 outrages of 1867, which he earnestly condemned, was for 
 conciliatory reforms — a complete reform in the land laws, 
 disestablishment of the State Church, encouragement 
 of industry, and the appointment of a Commission of 
 selected Irishmen, with some eminent English judges, to 
 examine into Irish grievances. Gladstone's policy in 
 1869 and 1870 followed substantially those lines, and in 
 1868 he acknowledged with cordial approval a copy of 
 Bradlaugh's Irish pamphlet— the only communication its 
 author had ever received from him up to 1880. In his 
 journal Bradlaugh promoted the formation of an 
 " Ireland Society " for the development of soundor 
 public opinion on Irish affairs ; and he lectured at 
 Dublin with much acceptance under the auspices of the 
 Irish Reform League. 
 
 As regarded France, his sympathies were fully released 
 after Sedan ; and he at onco proceeded to organize, with 
 some co-operation from Dr. Congreve, Professor Beesly, 
 and other leading English Positivists, a series of public 
 meetings by way of enlisting English feeling for diplo-
 
 POLITICS 39 
 
 matic intervention in the French interest. A brilliant 
 Frenchwoman, the Comtesse de Brirnont, was credited 
 with inspiring him to the effort, which inevitably came 
 to nothing. But from Gambetta and the Defence 
 Government in October, 1870, and from the French 
 Charge d' Affaires in February, 1871, he received warm 
 thanks. 
 
 Naturally, his main political work was to be done at 
 home ; and in the two middle decades of the century he 
 was a popular educator in Eadicalism, with a strong 
 flavour of Eepublicanism. To the League for Parlia- 
 mentary Eeform, established in 1865, of which he was 
 one of the Vice-Presidents, he rendered untold and abso- 
 lutely unpaid service, for which, when he resigned his 
 position on the executive, he received very strongly 
 expressed acknowledgments from the President and 
 Secretary. Bright, who at that time was the bogey of 
 the London Clubs and the Whiggish Liberals in respect 
 of his franchise agitation, had behind him the large part 
 of the population left unenfranchised ; and it was to that 
 mass that Bradlaugh mainly addressed himself. 
 
 Not till 1868 did he venture to stand as a parliamentary 
 candidate for Northampton, a two-seated constituency, 
 where, from the moment of forming that purpose, he 
 had spoken solely on political questions. Even the 
 Eeform Act of 1867 left multitudes of the poorer workers 
 voteless ; and this was notably the case at Northampton. 
 In a huge meeting in the open market only one hand 
 went up against him ; and at the hustings on the 
 nomination day the Mayor declared the show of hands 
 to be for Gilpin and Bradlaugh, as against Lord Henley, 
 the Whig ; but when it came to the polling he was well 
 beaten. He was, in fact, already the target of general 
 orthodox obloquy ; and as the election campaign lasted 
 five months all the hostile forces had ample time to
 
 40 POLITICS 
 
 operate. Only three newspapers in all England had a 
 friendly word for the Iconoclast. Mr. Levy, in his Daily 
 Telegraph, shuddered over the possibilities of a time 
 when Englishmen will revile the sublime moralities of 
 the New Testament." Stuart Mill created a sensation 
 and a scandal by sending £10 to Bradlaugh's election 
 fund, with a note expressing confidence that the candi- 
 date " would not contest any place where by so doing 
 he would risk the return of a Tory in the room of a 
 supporter of Mr. Gladstone and of the disendowmont of 
 the Irish Church." The Radical candidate had, in fact, 
 repeatedly offered to let a representative mooting of 
 Liberal electors settle the question ; but the sitting 
 Liberal member, though personally very friendly, felt 
 bound to coalesce with his Whig colleague, Lord Henley ; 
 and John Bright, appealed to by an elector for guidance, 
 briefly recommended that those two should be supported. 
 Whereupon the Saturday Beview exulted that Mr. Bright 
 had counteracted Mr. Mill. Gladstone, similarly con- 
 sulted, gave similar advice ; and the hearty support of 
 the Irish Reform League of that day was no counter- 
 vailing factor. The natural upshot was that whereas 
 the old Liberal member polled 2,600, the Whig 2,100, 
 and the Tories respectively 1,600 and 1,300, Bradlaugh's 
 figure was somewhere about 1,070. 
 
 Religious animosity, taking inventive forms in harmony 
 with early tradition and the practice of all ages, had been 
 particularly active against him. An idiotic story (current 
 against freethinkers long before him) of his having pub- 
 licly defied Omnipotence to strike him dead within five 
 minutes while he held his watch, obtained general credence 
 among antipathetic Christians, and served for political 
 confutation. Yet even at that stage only a small minority 
 of his Northampton supporters were freethinkers ; and 
 when by accession of support he later won the seat the
 
 POLITICS 41 
 
 proportion was probably less than a tenth. By way of 
 consolation, in 1868 he received from working women of 
 Northampton a gold pencil-case, subscribed for by their 
 pence. It may be that this had reference to his constant 
 support of the enfranchisement of women. Long after- 
 wards his famous colleague, Henry Labouchere (who 
 was very much of the contrary way of thinking on 
 woman suffrage), told him that if women had the vote 
 he, Bradlaugh, would be thrown out ; to which he replied 
 that he was not quite sure on the point, but that in any 
 case it was no reason for changing his opinion. 
 
 In 1868 Bradlaugh stood for everything that was 
 " awful " in the eyes of English propriety. When the 
 political Eadicalism of Bright could move professed 
 Liberals towards " fusion " with Tories, the all-round 
 Eadicalism of the professed " Iconoclast " was a thing 
 of horror. In 1866 the Times, indulging in the black- 
 guardism which then and long afterwards was reckoned 
 licit in respectable English journals, had declared, apropos 
 of the activities of the League for franchise reform, that 
 if Bradlaugh and Holyoake had their way " there would 
 be an end of the institution of marriage, and communism 
 with all its abominations would be established among 
 us." Bradlaugh was so little of a Communist that he 
 had not even been an Owenite; and his Neo-Malthusianism 
 was expressly addressed to the encouragement of early 
 marriage. But Matthew Arnold, impressed by the elo- 
 quence of the Times, thought fit to write in his Culture 
 and Anarchy in 1868 of " Mr. Bradlaugh, the Iconoclast, 
 who seems to be almost for baptizing us all in blood and 
 fire into his new social dispensation," and estimated him 
 as " evidently capable of running us all into great dangers 
 and confusions." The apostle of culture had not yet 
 written of " the fairy tale of Three Lord Shaftesburys " ; 
 and though he taught of " force till right is ready," the
 
 42 POLITICS 
 
 episode of the breaking of the Hyde Park railings in 
 1866 had stirred his sensitive spirit to the point of 
 demanding the application of his Christian father's 
 counsel that " the old Eoman way " with rioters was 
 always the right ono : " Flog the rank and file and fling 
 the ringleaders 1 from the Tarpeian Rock." It is edifying 
 to remember that the academic advocate of the lash and 
 the Tarpeian Rock for a London crowd who broke down 
 the Hyde Park railings when they thought themselves 
 illegally excluded, and who thus for his own part inter- 
 preted the principle of " force till right is ready," had in 
 the same essay been admonishing Bradlaugh, from the 
 revered page of Bishop Wilson, to remember that 
 Intemperance in talk makes a dreadful havoc in the 
 heart." As against the classico-Christian brutality of 
 the distinguished academics, father and son, it may be 
 interesting to note the political teaching that Bradlaugh 
 was actually giving in 1868. It is to be gathered from 
 his election address, which promised independent support 
 to the new Liberal party that was expected to be led by 
 Gladstone in the coming Parliament, in so far as its policy 
 was consistent with the following objects : — 
 
 1. Compulsory National Education. 
 
 2. Abolition of the laws of primogeniture and 
 entail, cheapening of the sale of land, and security 
 for improvements by agricultural tenants. 
 
 3. Radical retrenchment in national expenditure. 
 
 4. A readjustment of taxation, making its incidence 
 relatively heavier on accumulated wealth and large 
 estates. 2 
 
 1 As it happened, there were no ringleaders. Beales, the President 
 of the Reform League, and Bradlaugh had alike striven to prevent 
 any semblance of rioting ; and it was in the absence of all leaders 
 that the crowd, excluded from Hyde Park by a silly proclamation, 
 broke down the then small and weak railings and entered. Even 
 then they carefully respected the flower-beds, by the testimony of 
 an ex-Commissioner of Works. 
 
 2 In 1872 we find Bradlaugh calling for " power to deprive holders
 
 POLITICS 43 
 
 5. Legal equality for capital and labour, with 
 Conciliation Courts for trade disputes, and the 
 removal of such disputes from the jurisdiction of 
 the unpaid magistracy. 
 
 6. Complete separation of Church and State, 
 including the exclusion of Bishops from legislative 
 functions. 
 
 7. Provision for the representation of minorities 
 (i.e., Proportional Eepresentation, of which Brad- 
 laugh was an early advocate). 
 
 8. Abolition of all disabilities for speculative 
 opinion. 
 
 9. A system of life peerages, to be conferred only 
 for great national services ; proxy voting by peers 
 to be abolished, and habitual absentees to be 
 deprived of legislative privileges. 
 
 10. The establishment of a " National Party " in 
 the place of that led by aristocratic Whiggism. 
 
 To this terrible programme, with its occult menace of 
 " blood and fire," Bradlaugh added views of penal reform 
 which seem to have been specially alarming to Arnold. 
 He not only would not have consented to flog a whole 
 London crowd for breaking down park railings, or even 
 to hang their ringleaders (as Christian equivalent for the 
 Tarpeian Eock) ; he was opposed alike to capital punish- 
 ment and to flogging, even in cases of real crime. Later, 
 in Parliament, he was warmly active for the abolition 
 of the lash in the Army. He had seen men flogged. 
 
 of cultivable lands of their property, on proof of non-cultivation, at 
 
 a compensation not exceeding seven years' purchase Such lands 
 
 to be taken by the State, and let in small holdings " Some 
 
 proposal of this kind may have alarmed Arnold in 1868. But in 
 1872, when by the admission of the Times his supporters formed 
 the majority at a land-reform meeting in Exeter Hall, Edward 
 Russell, in the Liverpool Daily Post, wrote that "In this world it 
 is necessary to do good, even if the devil bids you ; and if Mr. 
 Bradlaugh can get the ear and the vote of a vast meeting by turning 
 half measures into whole ones, his alliance will have to be accepted, 
 and perhaps his advice may have to be followed." To his advocacy 
 of compulsory cultivation Bradlaugh always adhered. 
 
 E
 
 44 POLITICS 
 
 The difficulty about Arnold at times is to be sure whether 
 he had in any sense seen anything. 
 
 In 1869 an invitation to Bradlaugh to stand for South- 
 wark was backed by "an overwhelming majority" at 
 a selection meeting at which George Odger, officially 
 invited, was unable to be present ; but when Odger later 
 announced his willingness to stand, Bradlaugh at once 
 withdrew in - his favour. Odger was beaten where 
 Bradlaugh would probably have succeeded. In 1870 he 
 came newly to the front with his effort for France ; and 
 in 1871 ho incurred a new storm of opprobrium by 
 expressing the hope that, by the advent of a republic, the 
 then Prince of Wales, afterwards Edward VII, should 
 be prevented from becoming King. It was a bad mis- 
 calculation, based on the wave of republicanism then 
 visible ; and when in later years the Prince, whose gifts 
 as a man of the world were already beyond dispute, 
 expressed to Labouchere a genial wish to meet his former 
 assailant, the latter confessed that only his recollection 
 of his own language caused him to decline the honour. 
 But republican unpopularity was quaintly balanced by 
 the discovery that, when Gladstone at his famous Black- 
 heath meeting in 1871 avowedly quoted from a "question- 
 able book " lines which by his avowal contained " much 
 good sense," the homespun verse in question was from 
 a Secularist's Manual, to which Bradlaugh had con- 
 tributed a preface. 
 
 Meantime, he went on with all his many fights for a 
 free Press, for the right of freethinkers to affirm, for 
 freethought, and for land law reform. In March, 1868, 
 he had been called upon by the Disraeli Government to 
 conform to the law by which all cheap newspapers were 
 held bound to give money securities against the publica- 
 tion of blasphemy or sedition in their columns, and to 
 pay £20 for each copy of his paper, which had always
 
 POLITICS 45 
 
 been published in disregard of the Act. He formally 
 declined, and in due course was officially sued for owning 
 and publishing his paper, sold "at a less price than 
 sixpence — to wit, twopence." Most of the stalwarts of 
 the battle for a free Press — James Watson, Eichard 
 Moore, 0. D. Collet, Edward Truelove, and others — 
 rallied to the defence. As usual, the Crown lawyers 
 bungled their business ; and Bradlaugh, fighting his own 
 case against their array, secured from the Court of 
 Exchequer an order compelling them to give fuller 
 particulars of the Statutes founded on, which forced the 
 avowal that they relied on the obnoxious Act of 1819. 
 Bradlaugh then put in four pleas in defence ; and the 
 ill-starred Crown officials committed the fresh blunder 
 of arguing that he was limited to pleading " Not Guilty." 
 Again, after much pother, Bradlaugh won his point ; and 
 when the day came for the trial the Attorney- General 
 dropped the prosecution by the ignominious device of 
 not " praying a tales " when only ten jurymen were 
 forthcoming. 
 
 In that strategic retreat may be divined the worldly 
 wisdom of Disraeli. Gladstone, on the other hand, was 
 ill advised enough in 1869 to let his Government renew 
 the prosecution, which for years had been demanded by 
 such oracles of religion as the Saturday Revieiv. This 
 time the jury was again deficient, but " a tales " was 
 " prayed." Baron Bramwell gave a verdict for the 
 Crown, though again the Attorney-General was exhibited 
 by Bradlaugh as talking some bad law. The invincible 
 litigant moved for a new rule, and got one from the 
 Exchequer Court on three points. If he succeeded in 
 maintaining either of two, the prosecution was at an 
 end ; if only the third, a new trial would be necessary. 
 The chastened Solicitor to the Inland Revenue thereupon 
 intimated that the Treasury was prepared to repeal the
 
 46 POLITICS 
 
 old laws involved, and that " the Law Officers of the 
 Crown will agree to a stet processus heing entered," if 
 Bradlaugh would. To avoid further costs he did, pro- 
 testing formally that ho had not been liable under the 
 Statutos cited, and that a Liberal Government ought 
 never to have entered on such a prosecution. Mill sent 
 him congratulations from Avignon ; but the Government 
 would not pay his costs, which, as usual, were in excess 
 of the fund raised to moot them. It is not generally 
 remembered that in this fashion Gladstone had done 
 something to provoke the Nemesis that came upon him 
 when, in 1880, the Bradlaugh case was hung round the 
 neck of his Ministry. The forced repeal of the Security 
 Laws, freeing the whole Press, stands finally to tho 
 credit of Bradlaugh, and not of tho Liberal Government. 
 Only one London journal gave him support. 
 
 In 1873 Bradlaugh was in the United States on 
 a promising lecturing tour when there came the news 
 that Parliament was to be dissolved, and he had to 
 renounce, at heavy loss, his outstanding engagements in 
 order to get back at once for the election. He could not 
 arrive in time, and, though in his absence his cause was 
 strenuously supported by friends, ho was again beaten, 
 though this time a Tory headed tho poll, and tho Whig, 
 Lord Henley, had only 1,796 votes, to 1,653 for Bradlaugh. 
 He was about to return to the States when Mr. Gilpin, 
 who had been second on the poll, died. Bradlaugh had 
 offered to let Gilpin decide whether or not he should 
 withdraw from the constituency to avert further trouble ; 
 and Gilpin had been anxious for an accommodation ; but 
 nothing had been done ; and again he fought the seat. 
 This timo one Conservative and one Whig competed 
 with him ; and the Whig, a Mr. William Fowler, fought 
 him by means of the watch story and cognate weapons. 
 Odger, for whom ho had stood asido at Southwark, and
 
 POLITICS 47 
 
 who had similarly refused to stand against Bradlaugh, 
 gave his help, as did many others ; hut in vain. This 
 time the Tory, who had failed in 1873, won the vacant 
 seat, the Whig coming second with 1,836, and Bradlaugh 
 third with 1,766. Radical Northampton was represented 
 by two Tories ; Bradlaugh returned to the States to 
 meet his engagements, but only to incur a bad breakdown 
 of health and further loss ; and not till 1880 was he to 
 win election as a result, among other things, of the 
 enfranchisement of some thousands of his supporters 
 through the instrumentality of a Co-operative Building 
 Society.
 
 ADVENTURES AND CONFLICTS 
 
 ADVENTURES are to the adventurous ; and for Brad- 
 laugh, whose life was ono prolonged crusade, minor 
 conflicts formed the intermediate tissue. One of his 
 first skirmishes after he had left the army was fought on 
 behalf of a group of poor men who had clubbed their 
 savings to build a Working Men's Hall in Hackney. 
 Acting without legal advice, they built it on freehold 
 ground without any lease or conveyance from the free- 
 holder, who accordingly claimed the building as his 
 property. They then went to Bradlaugh for gratis 
 advice, such as he gave ungrudgingly to the last day of 
 his life. There being no remedy under the Statute of 
 Frauds, he advised them to offer a penalty rent of £20 a 
 year. " This being refused," he writes, " I constituted 
 myself into a law court ; and, without any riot or breach 
 of the peace, with the assistance of a hundred stout 
 men " he caused every brick of the building to be taken 
 away, dividing the materials, as far as possible, among 
 the true owners. The freeholder, as it happened, had 
 invested a few pounds to encourage the others ; and this 
 sum he fitly lost. 
 
 The episode illustrates a gift, sometimes exemplified in 
 his later life, for eking out law with honest force when 
 law failed at a pinch, or was turned to iniquity. Once, 
 in those early days, acting for his legal employer, he 
 removed by force certain business books which their owner 
 refused to give up according to contract ; and the latter 
 gave him in custody on a charge of " stealing the books." 
 
 48
 
 ADVENTUEES AND CONFLICTS 49 
 
 The charge was not followed up ; but Bradlaugh brought 
 an action for false imprisonment, and won it with £30 
 damages, upon which sum he married and set up house. 
 It was his destiny to win many larger sums as damages 
 from libellers ; but in this case alone did he pocket the 
 money, his other compensations all going to " charity " 
 in the shape of the Masonic Boys' School. Freemasons 
 on that score would seem to owe some little gratitude to 
 his memory. 
 
 Another episode of 1855 possesses a larger historical 
 interest. A Government Bill was introduced to penalize 
 heavily the open-air Sunday trading then abundantly 
 carried on in the East End of London. There were 
 exceptions as to hours, certain transactions being per- 
 mitted up to 9 a.m. and some after 1 p.m., whereby 
 church-going was to be promoted without the positing of 
 any intelligible interpretation of the Fourth Command- 
 ment. In the traditional British fashion, a meeting of 
 public protest was arranged for a Sunday afternoon in 
 Hyde Park ; and this the misguided authorities forbade, 
 an inspector of police politely stopping the proceedings. 
 The crowd, dispersing, chaffed the worldlings in their 
 carriages for making their servants work on Sunday and 
 disobeying the Government's orders to " go to church " ; 
 and some persons of title were alarmed to the point of 
 leaving their carriages and walking. Naturally, another 
 meeting was called for the next Sunday ; this in turn 
 was prohibited by handbill ; and Bradlaugh, holding that 
 the Commissioner of Police was acting ultra vires, went 
 to look on. This time there was more disturbance, 
 horses were frightened, the mounted police charged the 
 crowd, many were hurt, and seventy were arrested. 
 Bradlaugh, then a very powerful youth, had to threaten 
 to turn the truncheons of some of the police against 
 themselves in order to stop some bludgeoning.
 
 50 ADVENTUEES AND CONFLICTS 
 
 Lord Robert Grosvenor, who was in charge of the 
 provocative Bill, now avowed in the House that, though 
 his object was to increase the holiday time of the 
 "overtaxed thousands of the metropolis," he realized 
 that "this was one of those measures which are 
 peculiarly liable to misrepresentation and ridicule," and 
 accordingly withdrew it. A Eoyal Commission was 
 appointed to inquire into the disturbances ; and 
 Bradlaugh, one of eighty-six witnesses for the com- 
 plainants, against ninety-three for the police, gave 
 lengthy evidence for which he was publicly thanked by 
 the Commissioner and cheered by the audience in the 
 court-room. It was a thoroughly English episode, but 
 a mere preliminary brush for the crusader. 
 
 In 1858 Edward Truelove was arrested for publishing 
 a pamphlet by Bradlaugh's young friend W. E. Adams, 
 Is Tyrannicide Justifiable ? apropos of the attempt of 
 Orsini on the life of the French Emperor. The Emperor, 
 with his long roll of slain victims, was held by many 
 English folk to be outside the ordinary ethic in these 
 matters ; and Bradlaugh became honorary secretary for 
 the defence (the fund for which was contributed to by 
 Mill, F. W. Newman, W. J. Fox, M.P., Joseph Cowen, 
 Harriet Martineau, P. A. Taylor, and many other 
 Liberals), besides helping in the defence of Simon 
 Bernard, who was arrested at the request of the French 
 Government for alleged complicity in the attempt of 
 Orsini. Of the latter Bradlaugh spoke with warm 
 admiration. Bernard was found " Not Guilty " by the 
 jury ; and the prosecution of Truelove was abandoned by 
 the Government, with the corrupt connivance of his 
 counsel, Edwin James, who afterwards had to disappear 
 from public lifo and his native land. 
 
 Bradlaugh, always speaking in tumultuous political 
 meetings, and chronically debating and lecturing on such
 
 ADVENTUEES AND CONFLICTS 51 
 
 provocative issues as the character of the God of the Old 
 Testament, came frequently in danger of routine law on 
 the one hand and of private violence on the other. In 
 1859 a proposed lecture by him on Louis Napoleon was 
 stopped by the police, who garrisoned the hall ; and the 
 proprietor, indemnified by the Government, paid damages 
 for breach of contract. In 1860, at Wigan, the resident 
 clergy incited the populace to physical violence against 
 him, and the building in which he lectured was badly 
 damaged ; but, " supported by one courageous woman and 
 her husband," he returned to "Wigan again and again, till 
 he had won a strong following. In 1861, when he went to 
 Guernsey to defend against a threatened blasphemy pro- 
 secution a resident who had distributed some of his pam- 
 phlets, the authorities gave drink and leave of absence to 
 soldiers in the garrison, on condition of preventing him 
 from lecturing ; and the mob, civil and military, broke in 
 with shouts of "Kill the infidel"; but again only the 
 building was damaged, the soldiers making a very poor 
 fight against the ex-guardsman. At Plymouth, about this 
 period, he was arrested at the beginning of a lecture, 
 imprisoned, and refused bail. The arrest being a blunder, 
 a charge of inciting to breach of the peace and assaulting 
 a constable was trumped up. During his imprisonment 
 the crusader received from the outside many sumptuous 
 meals, including much Devonshire cream ; and when the 
 case came to trial, before seven magistrates bent on a 
 conviction, the witnesses for the prosecution all broke 
 down under his cross-examination. When his own 
 witnesses were refused, being then, as unbelievers in hell, 
 incompetent to give testimony under English law, several 
 Nonconformists bravely and honourably came forward to 
 testify, and he was perforce acquitted. 
 
 Having been much bullied by some of the magistrates, 
 he announced to them that he would deliver the inter-
 
 52 ADVENTUEES AND CONFLICTS 
 
 rupted lecture " to an audience assembled in the 
 borough," and that he would sue at law the Super- 
 intendent of Police who had arrested him. Both things 
 ho did. Placards were issued announcing that on 
 Sunday he would deliver his lecture " near the Devon- 
 port Park Gates " ; and a groat police force was in 
 waiting to arrest him. But he passed the crowd at the 
 gates, went by a by-lano to the river-side, stepped into a 
 small boat, and was rowed to a large one moored on the 
 Devonport side of tho River Tamar. This water was 
 under the jurisdiction of Saltash, several miles distant; 
 and tho authorities had to stand helpless while a very 
 freethinking discourse was delivered to a large audience 
 standing on an open wharf, while the lecturer stood 
 about nine feet outside tho borough. The action against 
 tho Superintendent was then duly brought, and tho case 
 was tried at Exeter Assizes, the officer being of course 
 supported by the borough authorities. Bradlaugh was 
 unfortunately persuaded to brief counsel, and Sir Robert 
 Collier, the " leader," thought fit to open by deploring his 
 client's opinions. In spite of this, after a long trial, he 
 won his case ; whereupon the jury, composed of Devon- 
 shire landowners, gave him a farthing damages, and the 
 presiding judge refused to certify for costs. Then the 
 insuppressible litigant took the case to the Court in 
 banco, and argued it for two days before the Lord Chief 
 Justice and a full bench. He obtained no relief, and 
 incurred altogether costs that for him were heavy ; but 
 the costs of the Devonport authorities wero so enormous 
 that never again did they interfere with him or any other 
 lecturer ; and Bradlaugh was sure of largo audiences in 
 tho largest halls in tho town as long as he lived. 
 
 Those episodes may be regarded as illustrating his 
 preparation for his destined task of fighting much more 
 important battlos on the side of public freedom, and,
 
 ADVENTUKES AND CONFLICTS 53 
 
 finally, one of stupendous length that remains historic. 
 But they also prefigured his fate in that every hattle 
 meant a new burden of debt, a steady pressure which, 
 when ultimately combined with an enormous and long pro- 
 tracted strain, brought about his death at an age beyond 
 which he might otherwise have lived for many years. 
 
 Adventures of a more romantic kind he had abroad. 
 In 1861, at Naples, he received in his room at his hotel, 
 on behalf of Mazzini, a packet of letters, delivered to him 
 without any conversation that could be overheard. 
 Leaving Naples, he went by a steamship flying the flag 
 of the Two Sicilies to Civita Vecchia, where a boatload 
 of Papal gendarmes came on board, whose officer asked 
 for Bradlaugh and informed him that the British Consul 
 wished to see him on shore. Discerning a snare, he 
 refused ; and his luggage was then called for. His 
 passport was treated with contempt, and the gendarmes 
 set about seizing his portmanteau, which contained the 
 packet of letters ; whereupon he drew his heavy Colt 
 revolver, pointed it at the head of the nearest gendarme, 
 and intimated that he would blow out the brains of any 
 who touched his luggage. In another moment he would 
 probably have been attacked from behind ; but an 
 opportune American, who had been watching the scene, 
 leapt to his aid, standing back to back and, with a 
 vigorously brandished chair for his weapon, undertook to 
 defend the rear. The gendarmerie hesitated and were 
 lost, deciding to go on shore for further instructions ; at 
 which stage Bradlaugh was able, with some trouble, to 
 persuade the captain to steam away. He reached his 
 destination without further interference. Upon one 
 occasion, he once mentioned, he was engaged in an 
 attempt to secure the election of a Liberal Pope ! But as 
 to that he did not vouchsafe details. 
 
 His latest Continental adventure of importance was in
 
 54 ADVENTURES AND CONFLICTS 
 
 1873, when the celebrated Republican Conference at 
 Birmingham, in a mooting of 4,500 persons, passed a 
 resolution of sympathy with the Spanish Republican 
 Government (which the British Government had refused 
 to recognize), and entrusted Bradlaugh with the carrying 
 of the message to Castelar, the Spanish President of the 
 moment. He went very swiftly, as was his wont. At 
 Irun, on the Spanish frontier, he found the line cut, and 
 further progress possible only by a caliche, through 
 country said to be dominated by the brigands under the 
 cur6 of Santa Cruz. Some Carlists appeared at times, 
 but did not catch the caliche; and some ruffians who 
 sought to board it, but were unablo to do so, were 
 described by the driver as only thieves. Thus San 
 Sebastian was reached ; whence the advance was con- 
 tinued by an extremely precarious diligence through 
 Tolosa, Allegria, Beasain, and Mondragon, towards 
 Vittoria. On the way he saw Carlist handiwork in the 
 shape of a successful attempt, by means of a cut line and 
 a damaged tunnel, to wreck a passenger train coming 
 from San Sebastian. Just then subscriptions for the 
 Carlist cause were being advertised for in the Times. 
 
 The only serious stoppage from Carlists meant but a 
 long delay and some looting and tariffing of alleged 
 contraband, at some distance from Vittoria. Between 
 Burgos and Madrid the train narrowly escaped running 
 into a Carlist barricade which would have destroyed it 
 with its passengers. At Madrid he was much feted, and 
 had several interviews with Castelar — one in form at the 
 Ministry of Foreign Affairs, three at the President's 
 private residence, and one at his hotel. It was 
 presumably at one of those interviews that, informed of 
 the trouble given by a traitorous general in the north, 
 Bradlaugh offered to ride with fifty dragoons and shoot 
 the genoral in question. That kind of thing was not in
 
 ADVBNTUEES AND CONFLICTS 55 
 
 Castelar's line ; and after Bradlaugh's death he published 
 a false statement to the effect that he had not received 
 him at the Ministry, but invited him to call at an early- 
 hour in the morning at his private residence. Bradlaugh 
 got home by Santander and Bordeaux, with many 
 difficulties, to learn from the Weekly Dispatch that his 
 expenses had been " entirely defrayed by the Carlist 
 Committee in London." The inefficiency of Castelar 
 must have been clear to him ; but he always spoke of 
 him kindly, though his remark that the Spanish 
 situation needed " a Cromwell with the purity of a 
 Washington " was probably the source of the rankling 
 resentment which, after Bradlaugh's death, relieved itself 
 in a despicable outburst of aspersion. 
 
 After his Spanish trip Bradlaugh was substantially 
 disillusioned as to the prospects of Continental 
 republicanism. In Spain he had seen Carlist prisoners 
 drafted to fight in Cuba, a very low level of discipline in 
 the republican army, and fatal irresolution in the 
 republican leaders. In his autobiographical sketch he 
 even avowed much lack of confidence as to the future of 
 republican France. Gambetta he had seen much of, and 
 esteemed as he deserved ; though he entirely disapproved 
 of all the anti-clerical reprisals which Gambetta and his 
 friends excusably thought necessary. But, he wrote, 
 "the years 1870 to 1873 have dispelled some of my 
 illusions, held firmly during the fifteen years which pre- 
 ceded. I had believed in such men as Louis Blanc, 
 Ledru Rollin, Victor Hugo, as possible statesmen for 
 France. I was mistaken. They were writers, talkers, 
 and poets ; good men to ride on the stream, or to drown 
 in honest protest, but lacking force to swim against, or 
 turn back, the tide by the might of their will. I had 
 believed too in a Republican France, which is yet only 
 in the womb of time, to be born after many pangs and
 
 56 ADVENTURES AND CONFLICTS 
 
 sore travailing." But to the last he had many French 
 friendships, among his intimates being such diverse types 
 as Goblet, President of the Chambre in the eighties ; 
 Prince Jerome, of whom ho had frequently to disapprove, 
 but whom he advised about his will as about his politics ; 
 and Yves Guyot, the veteran of our own day. And no 
 disillusionment about theoretic politics could slacken his 
 determination in the unexpected struggles which lay 
 before him in the course of events at home. 
 
 In the way of physical conflict, perhaps his most 
 memorable experience was in connection with the 
 political storm aroused by Gladstone's campaign on the 
 " Bulgarian atrocities " in 1878. That was much 
 resented by the Russophobe and pro-Turkish Toryism of 
 the day ; and when Bradlaugh, always an anti- 
 Disraelian, organized open-air meetings in support of 
 Gladstone and against the Conservative Government, 
 London Conservatism organized a counter-attack, in 
 which the physical use of loaded bludgeons played a 
 prominent part. At one Hyde Park meeting at which 
 he spoke with his customary power, not sparing Disraeli, 
 a vigorous rush was made in which he was thrown 
 down ; and in the meUe blows from the loaded bludgeons 
 rained on the arm which he raised to guard his head. 
 Getting at last to his feet, he snatched from a friend a 
 short baton, innocent of metal, with which he struck five 
 blows, which sent five men to St. George's Hospital. 
 The Berserker in him was roused, as was to happen 
 once again. In both cases severe erysipelas was the 
 physiological outcome.
 
 VI 
 
 NEO-MALTHUSIANISM 
 
 It was customary in those days to dub every man a 
 " demagogue " who appealed politically to the masses ; 
 and when he was also a freethought lecturer it was usual 
 to associate with the label the statement that the 
 demagogue had earned a large income with his tongue. 
 If Bradlaugh was a demagogue, he did not live up to 
 that ideal. In his early lecturing days, after he had left 
 the army, his life was one of chronic hardship ; and even 
 notoriety meant for him costly legal battles which kept 
 him always in debt. His sole income was from his 
 journalism, his lectures, and his pamphlets ; and he gave 
 literally hundreds of lectures of which the proceeds went 
 to public causes, he paying his own expenses. Always 
 in debt through his legal struggles, he could give in no 
 other way ; but in that fashion he aided the causes of 
 Polish and Italian freedom and of franchise reform, the 
 funds for the relief of Lancashire distress in the cotton 
 famine, the Sheffield distress from the inundation of 
 1864, and many minor efforts to finance poverty. On 
 the other hand, he deliberately declared himself, early in 
 life, a believer in the Malthusian doctrine as to popula- 
 tion, and the Neo-Malthusian doctrine as to the limita- 
 tion of families. The twofold doctrine, first systemati- 
 cally propounded privately by Kobert Owen and Francis 
 Place, had been printed for working-class freethinkers by 
 Eichard Carlile ; and Bradlaugh, holding it to be true 
 and vital, faced unpopularity on the double count of free- 
 
 57
 
 58 NEO-MALTHUSIANISM 
 
 thinking and Malthusianism. Common sense may 
 reveal even to orthodox men to-day that it was not a 
 concern for lucre that could move any man in the last 
 age to set up such a combination of anathematized pro- 
 pagandas. John Mill in his early youth narrowly 
 escaped a police prosecution for distributing Neo- 
 Malthusian literature. Bradlaugh, who always refused 
 to discuss on the platform matters not properly to be 
 there handlod, found himself, at a time when he could 
 ill afford any supererogatory odium, committed to the 
 defence of the sale of a long-published treatise dealing 
 with the physiological side of family limitation. This 
 was the Fruits of Philosophy : an Essay on the Popula- 
 tion Question, by Dr. Edward Knowlton, an American 
 physician. It had been published freely in England for 
 forty years when, in 1877, the authorities decided to 
 prosecute those who sold it. The first man indicted, at 
 Bristol, appears to have been one of those who sell Neo- 
 Malthusian books along with productions conveying 
 nothing save pruriency : but the then publisher, an 
 associate and friend of Bradlaugh's, at that point stood 
 forward, and was in turn arrested. On reflection he 
 decided that the pamphlet was indefensible, and pleaded 
 " guilty " to the indictment. This at once brought 
 Bradlaugh into action. He did not like the flowery style 
 of the book, which was not in any adequate sense a work 
 of " philosophy " ; nor was its physiology up-to-date ; 
 but to let it go undefended as indecent was to let a slur 
 be cast on the memories of his old friends James Watson 
 and Austin Holyoake, the former publishers, and this he 
 would not do. Accordingly he took upon himself the 
 legal responsibility of publication ; and Mrs. Annie 
 Besant, who three years before had become his colleague 
 and was now his business partner in the Freethought 
 Publishing Company, insisted, much to his embarrass-
 
 NEO-MALTHUSIANISM 59 
 
 ment, on sharing his risks. He was of course taunted, 
 by people who had never dared to face any kind of risk, 
 with " sheltering himself behind a woman." She 
 certainly did three men's work in getting up the 
 scientific side of the case ; but the calumny which in 
 due course she incurred was for him the sorest part of 
 the joint burden. At the same time, the breach between 
 him and his old friend, the last publisher, spread to some 
 extent in the Secularist body, bringing a new trouble 
 into a life already so full of struggle. But the battle 
 had to be fought ; and while Mrs. Besant was absorbed 
 in her part, his two young daughters came to his aid by 
 taking up the detail work of his journal, the National 
 Beformer. 
 
 The police prosecution was straightforwardly chal- 
 lenged, the partners announcing their intention to sell in 
 person the condemned work, which they did, to many 
 buyers. In due course they were arrested ; their 
 premises were vainly searched in the sage hope of 
 finding really improper literature ; and they were charged 
 before the municipal Court at the Guildhall. Counsel 
 offered to drop the prosecution against Mrs. Besant, but 
 she inflexibly refused to be left out. Managing matters 
 with his usual technical skill, Bradlaugh got the Court 
 of Queen's Bench — thanks mainly, perhaps, to the Lord 
 Chief Justice, Sir Alexander Cockburn — to transfer the 
 trial from the Central Criminal Court, to be heard before 
 a judge and a special jury. Curiously enough, the name 
 of the prosecuting person or authority was never dis- 
 closed, and could not be formally elicited ; but the ill- 
 famed Society for the Suppression of Vice openly took a 
 hand in the campaign by prosecuting Edward Truelove, 
 who sold in his shop Bobert Dale Owen's Moral Physio- 
 logy. In his case the result was conviction and 
 imprisonment. At the same period the police confiscated
 
 GO NEO-MALTHUSIANISM 
 
 copies of The Freethinker's Text-Book and Bradlaugh's 
 pamphlet on Jesus, Shelley, and Malthus ; and literature 
 sent out by the F. P. Company was opened in the Post 
 Office. The general battle for a free press, it seemed, 
 was to be fought over again. 
 
 Some interesting episodes occurred whon the indicted 
 partners sought to obtain witnesses of standing in regard 
 to points to be argued in the defence. Professor Fawcett, 
 like most economists, had endorsed the law of population 
 as propounded by Malthus ; but he vehemently refused 
 to be subpoenaed in a friendly way. Darwin, who knew 
 the main truth well enough, having founded his whole 
 theory upon it, differed as to the Neo-Malthusian 
 remedy, holding the curiously pessimistic position that 
 the struggle for existence should not be so mitigated, its 
 continuance being in his view necessary to progress. He 
 courteously and quite truly pleaded, however, that his 
 weak health would make the strain of appearance in 
 Court a matter of great suffering to him, if he were able 
 to come, which was unlikely ; and he of course was not 
 pressed. On the other hand, Mr. H. G. Bohn, the aged 
 publisher, who in the past had been reputed zealous for 
 " Christian Evidences," volunteered as a witness, and 
 was most valuable, testifying as he did to the long 
 and unchallenged currency of standard physiological 
 works, such as the Animal Physiology of W. B. 
 Carpenter, in which was given the physiological informa- 
 tion that was now indicted as "obscene" in the 
 Knowlton pamphlet. Dr. Alice Vickery and Dr. Charles 
 Drysdale, who with Bradlaugh had re- founded the 
 Malthusian League, fearlessly bore their effective 
 testimony as physicians alike to the moral and the 
 medical importance of the Neo-Malthusian doctrine. 
 
 For four days the trial lasted, the two defendants 
 arraying part of the mass of evidence and argument
 
 NEO-MALTHUSIANISM 61 
 
 which to this day is evaded, going unrebutted, save by 
 scurrility and bluster, by the people who will rather face 
 immeasurable vice and misery than encourage early 
 marriage with deliberate limitation of families. The 
 Solicitor-General, Sir Hardinge Giffard, in opening 
 had avowed that " the book, I think it may be said, is 
 carefully guarded from any vulgarity of expression : the 
 whole tone of it is, as I say, under the guise of philo- 
 sophy and medical science " ; yet saw fit to say in his 
 speech of reply that " this is a dirty, filthy book," giving 
 reasons worthy of the proposition. His own language 
 was at points such that it had to be expunged or para- 
 phrased in the reports. He incoherently avowed, 
 however, that the prosecution was " most mischievous 
 in its character and probably in its result," pleading that 
 the authorities felt themselves compelled to take action 
 in order to avoid the greater mischief of admitting that 
 the book should be freely sold. The Lord Chief Justice, 
 in his summing-up, emphatically agreed on the first head, 
 declaring that " a more ill-advised and more injudicious 
 proceeding in the way of a prosecution was probably 
 never brought into a court of justice," and passing 
 scathing comments on the " authorities " who had never 
 divulged their status. The summing-up, treating the 
 indicted book as a medical work, was held by the press 
 to be substantially in favour of the defendants. Yet 
 after an absence of an hour and a-half the jury, who had 
 become hopelessly confused among themselves as to what 
 they could agree upon, returned through the foreman the 
 egregious verdict : " We are unanimously of opinion that 
 the book in question is calculated to deprave public 
 morals, but at the same time we entirely exonerate the 
 defendants from any corrupt motives in publishing it." 
 This was in effect a verdict of Guilty. Afterwards it 
 came out that six of the jury had not intended to assent
 
 62 NEO-MALTHUSIANISM 
 
 to a verdict of guilty. Among the other six wore some 
 who, in discussion, avowed religious as distinct from 
 moral motives. 
 
 On going to receive sentence, with Mrs. Bosant, 
 Bradlaugh was ready as usual with the apparatus of 
 appeal, submitting three motions — one to quash the 
 indictment, one for arrest of judgment, and one for a new 
 trial. The Solicitor-General skilfully argued that since 
 the verdict the defendants had continued to soil the book, 
 and that Mrs. Besant had publicly claimed that the 
 Lord Chief Justice's summing-up was in their favour. 
 Cockburn had already refused to grant any motion or 
 stay of execution, and now, irritated, he passed a 
 sentence of six months' imprisonment and fines of £200 
 each. But, just as the partners were being taken into 
 custody, the shamed judge recalled them, and offered " on 
 consideration " to stay execution on their pledge not to 
 sell the book until the Court of Appeal had decided. 
 This was readily agreed to ; and the defendants were 
 liberated on their own recognizances of £100 each. 
 
 The next step was quaint. In the Court of Appeal 
 (February, 1878) Lord Justice Bramwell, in a lengthy 
 and searching pronouncement, showed that, as had been 
 argued by Bradlaugh, the original indictment had been 
 " bad " in that it had vacuously set forth that the 
 defendants had published " an obscene libel, to wit, 
 The Fruits of Philosophy," giving no details. The 
 Solicitor-General (afterwards Lord Chancellor) had 
 officially prosecuted " an obscene libel — to wit, this 
 libel." Since the " to wit " merely identified the libel 
 and did not describe it, it was " wholly defective," and 
 judgment must be given for tho parties indicted. The 
 whole prosecution was thus quashed, once for all. Mrs. 
 Besant soon produced a more scientific and cogent 
 pamphlet entitled The Law of Popidation, which no
 
 NEO-MALTHUSIANISM 63 
 
 " authorities " ever ventured to prosecute. The City 
 authorities, who had lurked behind the other which they 
 subsidized, had had enough. 
 
 Two memorable facts are to be noted concerning the 
 famous trial of 1877. One is that Mrs. Besant, who by 
 her action in the matter made it possible for the law 
 courts to deprive her, with gross judicial insult, of the 
 custody of her little girl on the suit of her husband, the 
 Eev. Frank Besant, afterwards, on her conversion to 
 " theosophy," renounced her Neo-Malthusian teaching. 
 The other is that the Knowlton Trial was the means of 
 making known the possibility and expediency of family 
 limitation to the British population at large ; and that 
 from the next year or two onwards there proceeded that 
 fall in the birth-rate which has in the last few years 
 come under the investigation of the National Birth-Kate 
 Commission. Thus to Bradlaugh, who never wavered in 
 either his economic or his philosophic creed, goes the 
 credit of having set up in his own country, on a decisive 
 scale, one of the most momentous changes in social con- 
 ditions that have ever taken place in human history- Its 
 full operation has yet to .be realized ; but there is no 
 question, on either side of the debate, as to its gravity. 
 
 The claim here made for him is that family limitation 
 has already meant an immense restriction of human 
 misery and a great increase of innocent happiness, with 
 an effect on total national strength of which the World 
 War gives the proof. The charge still made is that the 
 doctrine promotes vice, sin, and degeneration. Those 
 who make the charge have been abundantly informed 
 that vice has in the past been enormously promoted by 
 the abstention from marriage of young men who fear 
 to face the burdens of a rapidly growing family. This 
 evidence they ignore. They have been abundantly 
 informed of the appalling destruction of infant life
 
 64 NEO-MALTHUSIANISM 
 
 resulting from poverty ; and they in effect argue that it 
 is better to have infanticide, a holocaust of infant deaths, 
 and an infinity of prostitution with misery and degrada- 
 tion unspeakable, than to practise any such restraint on 
 procreation as is normal among the peasantry of France. 
 Bradlaugh early made up his mind on the problom. In 
 a youthful pamphlet on Jesus, Shelley, and Malthus, he 
 summed up the three tempers mainly revealed in social 
 history — that of religious submission, that of humanitarian 
 revolt, and that of science ; and his appeal to the people 
 was to cultivate the last. In a later pamphlet, on 
 Poverty and its Effect on the Political Condition of the 
 People (1863), he took up the irrefragable position that 
 
 Unless the necessity of the preventative or positive 
 checks to population be perceived ; unless it be 
 clearly seen that they must operate in one form if 
 not in another, and that, though individuals may 
 escape them, the race cannot, human society is 
 a hopeless and insoluble riddle. 
 
 For his teaching he was vilified alike by those who 
 cannot and those who will not see the truth ; by the 
 types who privately batten on the prurient and publicly 
 protest against indelicate science ; by the middle and 
 upper class people who want cheap labour and abject 
 life ; and by the pietists whose intelligence, unequal to 
 the perception of any natural law, is sworn to the task 
 of vindicating all evil in the name of the goodness of 
 God. Some Liberals have not scrupled to maintain that 
 Neo-Malthusianism is Tory doctrine, because the original 
 static doctrine of Malthus found Tory wolcome. Neo- 
 Malthusianism is the ejection of the Tory non-possumus 
 from political science. 
 
 The summing-up of the debate is that in Christian 
 times, until Malthus wrote, the general mind had had 
 no glimpse of the problem of natural law in regard to
 
 NEO-MALTHUSIANISM 65 
 
 population ; and that, just as in regard to every new 
 phase of the dissolution of orthodox religion, it reacted 
 largely by way of anger and vituperation. "When 
 Bradlaugh's action brought to universal notice the 
 problem which Malthus had introduced to the more 
 studious, the fury was proportionate. The average 
 philoprogenitive man hates to hear of a law that convicts 
 him of working his own bane in the legal gratification of 
 his instincts ; and the average optimist reformer, beating 
 the surface of things, is exasperated by the warning that 
 social evil lies deeper than the Statute Book. In those 
 circumstances the evasive " authorities " had the sym- 
 pathy of multitudes in the iniquity which prosecutes and 
 penalizes the serious promulgation of scientific truth 
 while assenting without a murmur to the circulation 
 of all the purposive indecencies in English literature, 
 whether contained in the Canterbury Tales, the Eliza- 
 bethan or the Eestoration drama, Sterne, Fielding, or 
 Swinburne. " Bespectable " England, in so far as it 
 reads real literature at all, cherishes these on its sanctum 
 shelves, not solely for their literary genius, but largely 
 for their improprieties ; and, in so far as it reads the 
 Bible, is more familiar with similar elemants in the 
 Pentateuch than with anything else. Into this world 
 of furtive hypocrisy Bradlaugh brought the breath of 
 a better life. The bigots and the hypocrites are still 
 vociferous against his social science. But he wrought 
 the beginning of the end of their dominion.
 
 VII 
 PARLIAMENTARY STRUGGLE 
 
 WHEN, after more than five years of Conservative 
 government, the General Election of 1880 came in sight, 
 Northampton Liberalism was still divided over Bradlaugh. 
 It was tolerably certain that his local organization, 
 admirably managed by Councillor (afterwards Mayor) 
 Adams, had latterly made his success certain. The men 
 who had fought him during twelve years were loth to 
 come to terms with him ; and they strove hard, but 
 vainly, to find an acceptable Liberal candidate or candi- 
 dates who would antagonize him. The last appealed to 
 was Henry Labouchere, the famous journalist, proprietor 
 of Tmth. By his own humorous account, he went to 
 Northampton with a Whig speech in one pocket and 
 a Radical speech in the other. Whatever was the 
 outfit, he promptly realized the situation, and informed 
 the official Liberal organizers that he would stand only 
 as co-candidate with Bradlaugh. Making a virtue of 
 necessity, they accepted the alliance, Bradlaugh good- 
 humouredly burying his considerable grounds for grudge. 
 Mr. (afterwards Sir) Thomas Wright, of Leicester, who 
 had previously stood independently, not combining with 
 Bradlaugh, but deprecating further Liberal opposition, 
 now generously withdrew, giving his support to both of 
 the chosen candidates. In due course, Northampton 
 played its part in the great Liberal victory, returning 
 Labouchere and Bradlaugh in place of the former Tory 
 members. Nearly all of Bradlaugh's own supporters, on 
 
 m
 
 PAELIAMENTAEY STEUGGLE 67 
 
 his earnest appeal, loyally "split " for Labouchere ; but 
 there were always some orthodox hundreds in the other 
 wing who " plumped " in general elections, leaving 
 Bradlaugh the " junior " member. Hence the figures in 
 1880 were : Labouchere (L), 4,518 ; Bradlaugh (E), 3,827 ; 
 Phipps (C), 3,152 ; Merewether (C), 2,826. Considering 
 that nearly all of the Anglican and some of the Noncon- 
 formist pulpits were in full blast against the " infidel," 
 the result was creditable. But the political pressure 
 had been strong. Mr. Samuel Morley, a prominent 
 Dissenter and part proprietor of the Daily Neivs, urged 
 that all Liberals should sink other considerations in 
 favour of turning out the Tories. The story that Mr. 
 Spurgeon sent the message : " If the Devil himself were 
 a Liberal candidate I should vote for him," was " a thing 
 devised by the enemy " — the Tory enemy, that is. 
 
 When the figures were proclaimed, a roar of anger 
 passed over orthodox England ; and poor Mr. Samuel 
 Morley, fiercely denounced for his action, made an abject 
 recantation. Spurgeon, who was of another texture, 
 indignantly repudiated the antinomian doctrine ascribed 
 to him, but manfully declared that Bradlaugh's title to 
 sit in Parliament had nothing to do with orthodoxy. 
 The majority of the House of Commons, including a 
 number of Liberals, took another view, to their own 
 ultimate discomfiture. 
 
 Parliamentary oath-taking in England began under 
 Elizabeth, and has ever since been maintained ; no 
 number of perjuries in the period of dynastic and civil 
 strifes and no amount of indecorum in the chronic 
 " scramble for Testaments " having availed to discredit 
 the practice. France after 1870 did without it, as did 
 the German Eeichstag ; Austria in 1868 decently substi- 
 tuted affirmation ; the United States permit of either 
 that or oath-taking ; and in Italy the formula is simply :
 
 68 PARLIAMENTARY STRUGGLE 
 
 " I swear." The most medievally elaborate oath subsists 
 in Spain. Since 1829 Catholics in England have been 
 allowed to take the Catholic oath ; since 1833 Quakers 
 have been permitted to sit on simple affirmation of 
 loyalty ; after 1859 Jews were allowed to swear in the 
 Judaic form ; and in I860 the adjuration of all the 
 religious oaths was reduced to the popular formula : 
 " So help me God." In 1868, when there was as yet no 
 permission of affirmation in courts of law, Bradlaugh, 
 though much troubled on the subject, had been prepared 
 to conform to the established practice, as Mill did when 
 in 1865 he had sworn allegiance "on the true faith of 
 a Christian," as other unbelievers did before and in 1880 
 in the later form, and as Mr. John Morley was to do in 
 1883. But Bradlaugh now privately consulted the former 
 Liberal law-officers of the Crown, and, finding them to 
 be (as Sir Henry James avowed they always remained) 
 of his opinion that he was legally entitled (under the 
 Parliamentary Oaths Act, 1866 ; the Evidence Amend- 
 ment Act, 1869 ; and the Further Evidence Amendment 
 Act of 1870, which " explains and amends " the last) to 
 make affirmation of his allegiance, he decided that in 
 honour and decency he was bound to make application 
 for that purpose. 
 
 It was this concern for honour and decency that made 
 possible all the subsequent trouble. On May 3, 1880, 
 he gave formal and respectful notice to the Clerk of the 
 House of his claim to be allowed to affirm " as a person 
 for the time being permitted to make a solemn affirma- 
 tion or declaration instead of taking an oath." The 
 Speaker, Sir Henry Brand, unfortunately for his own 
 official fame, decided upon his appearance to request him 
 to withdraw, and thon laid the matter before the House, 
 avowing "grave doubts," and referring the matter to its 
 judgment. The advice of the now law-officers being not
 
 PAELIAMENTARY STRUGGLE 69 
 
 yet available, Lord Frederick Cavendish, on behalf of 
 the Government, moved for a Select Committee ; and 
 Sir Stafford Northcote, the leader of the Opposition, 
 supported. To a Select Committee, accordingly, the 
 matter went. 
 
 Already partizan zeal had announced, through the 
 mouth of Sir Henry Drummond Wolff — one of the four 
 who constituted the " Fourth Party " of that day — the 
 intention to exploit the Bradlaugh case for party purposes. 
 As Lord Rosebery remarks in his book on Lord Randolph 
 Churchill, who was one of the foremost of the hunting 
 pack, it was splendid " sport " for them as politicians. 
 When the names of the proposed Committee were 
 announced, this tactic began. Mr. Stanley Leighton 
 untruthfully alleged that Bradlaugh had been pressed 
 upon Northampton by the Liberal Whip, prompted by 
 Gladstone ; and an Irish Catholic, F. H. O'Donnell, 
 alias Macdonald, gave the first of many wildly menda- 
 cious Catholic accounts of Bradlaugh's doctrines. A 
 division was taken, most of the Conservative leaders 
 walking out of the House ; and 74 voted against the 
 motion for the Committee, 171 supporting it. It was 
 evidently feared that the Committee was in fairness 
 bound to support Bradlaugh's claim. What happened 
 was that eight members supported it and eight opposed, 
 the chairman, Mr. Spencer H. Walpole, giving his casting 
 vote for the Noes. This historian later put his hand 
 to the categorically false assertion that Bradlaugh had 
 " refused to take an oath, not because he had any con- 
 scientious objection to be sworn, but because an appeal 
 to a God — in whom he had no belief — seemed to him an 
 idle formula which was not binding on his conscience." 1 
 
 1 The Electorate and the Legislature, by Spencer Walpole, 
 1881, rep. 1892, p. 75.
 
 70 PAELIAMENTABY STRUGGLE 
 
 The historian must have known that his statement was 
 false Bradlaugh had never refused to take the oath ; 
 and while the law technically — as judges had avowed — 
 implied that the oath was not binding on an atheist's 
 conscience, he had expressly repudiated the expression, 
 repeatedly declaring during 1880 that any promise he 
 made would as such bo binding on his conscience, 
 whether or not accompanied by an imprecation. 
 
 The false account of his position became for the 
 majority the battle-cry against him. He had sought to 
 avoid an act which might justly give offence to religious 
 persons, the taking of the oath when, with high legal 
 confirmation, he believed ho need not. Formally refused 
 permission, he announced that ho would take the oath in 
 order to obtain his seat. He was then simultaneously 
 told that he ought to have done so at first, that he had 
 refused, and that it was an act of hypocrisy to offer 
 now to swear. In the chorus some freethinkers joined, 
 including G. J. Holyoake, for whose business partnership 
 in past days the oath had been taken whenever necessary 
 by his brother Austin, an atheist esteemed by all who 
 knew him. G. J. Holyoake had also once avowed 
 himself ready to take the oath "if it were regarded as 
 a civil act," which was exactly what Bradlaugh now 
 proposed to do. All the same, Holyoake's attack was 
 used to the utmost against the other. 
 
 When Bradlaugh on May 21 presented himself to take 
 the oath, the Speaker made the fatal mistake of allowing 
 the intervention of Sir H. D. Wolff with a hostile motion 
 — a course which his successor in 1886 authoritatively 
 declared to be inadmissible. A long sequel of parlia- 
 mentary scones, debates, votes, forced elections, renewed 
 scenes, bills, lawsuits, decisions, and appeals was tho 
 consequence. 
 
 The permitted motion on the Tory side, that the
 
 ^ 
 
 tjrm - ',>' 
 
 m 
 
 V 
 
 MnW|^ 
 
 •?-. 
 
 AT THE BAR OF THE HOUSE 
 (From a Paintinc by Walter Sickert)
 
 PAELIAMENTABY STRUGGLE 71 
 
 claimant should not be allowed to take the oath, was 
 met by Gladstone with an amendment referring the 
 claim to another Select Committee, which was carried 
 by 289 votes to 214 ; and this course was taken. 
 Bradlaugh was lengthily examined by the Committee, 
 to whom he fully and expressly showed that he had 
 never refused to take the oath, or said that it would not 
 bind him. The Committee, however, reported that he 
 could not properly take the oath, but recommended that 
 he be allowed to affirm at his legal peril. On his again 
 presenting himself at the House to do this, Labouchere, 
 who fought the battle from beginning to end with no 
 less ability than loyalty, moved that he be allowed to 
 affirm ; but this was defeated (June 22) by 275 votes to 230, 
 the majority including many Home Eulers, many Liberals, 
 some Nonconformists, and some Jews. Next day Brad- 
 laugh presented himself, claiming to be sworn, and, being 
 refused, was nevertheless allowed, after debate, to make 
 his First Speech at the Bar. 1 Upon Bradlaugh's retiring, 
 Labouchere moved the rescinding of the resolution of 
 the 22nd ; but this was withdrawn at Gladstone's 
 request ; and Bradlaugh was recalled to the Table and 
 formally commanded to withdraw from the House. 
 This he respectfully and repeatedly refused to do ; and, 
 Gladstone declining to take any action, a sharp discussion 
 ended in Bradlaugh's being " committed to the Clock 
 Tower " on the motion of the much-perturbed Northcote. 
 Before this could be given effect to, there occurred the 
 scene of his repeatedly withdrawing to the Bar when 
 requested by the Sergeant-at-Arms to do so, and imme- 
 diately returning to the Table. Northcote, helplessly 
 admitting that nobody could condemn Bradlaugh for his 
 
 1 Keprinted, with the others, in Speeches by Charles Bradlaugh, 
 1890 ; second and enlarged ed., with annotations, 1895.
 
 72 PARLIAMENTARY STRUGGLE 
 
 courso, at length moved that he be taken into custody 
 by the Sergeant ; Gladstone refusing to interfere. It 
 was after Parnell had made a creditable speech, in which 
 he declared his dissent from the majority of the Irish 
 Home Rulers on the question, that the motion was 
 carriod, and Bradlaugh locked up in the historic room 
 on the second story of the Clock Tower. 
 
 There, however, he was allowed to roceivo a constant 
 stream of friendly visitors, among whom were Parnell 
 and some other Irish Nationalists. Outside, his friends 
 had gone instantly to work ; petitions flew broadcast ; 
 and the general indignation was so pronounced that next 
 day Northcote hurriedly moved for Bradlaugh's uncon- 
 ditional release, which was as hurriedly agreed to. 
 The moving force, it was said, was Beaconsfield, who, 
 Bradlaugh heard, vehemently condemned the entire 
 proceedings, and called his followers fools for their pains. 
 
 The House of Commons was indeed in a ludicrous 
 plight. It had in effect decided in several different ways 
 that its own members were not to be believed on an 
 important matter unless they added, " So help me God," 
 and thus excluded the non-Quaker who, like the Quaker 
 Bright, claimed to speak the truth under all serious 
 circumstances. Having taken him into custody, it 
 immediately released him, leaving everything to resume 
 da capo. Labouchere, to help it out of its mess, now 
 introduced an Affirmation Bill ; but Gladstone proposed 
 (July 1), as a standing order, the compromise of letting 
 the atheist sit pending the legal settlement of his claim 
 to sit, upon which the House had already pronounced. 
 By assenting, the House avowed that the law courts 
 might overrule its action. Gladstone's proposal was met 
 by fresh Tory obstruction. He had honourably defended 
 Bradlaugh from the charge of obtruding his opinions on 
 the House. In point of fact, both Committees of Inquiry
 
 PAELIAMENTARY STRUGGLE 73 
 
 had done their best to get hirn to avow his opinions 
 against his will, thus admitting that he had never 
 obtruded them. On July 2, accordingly, he made 
 affirmation, and took his seat, which he was to hold 
 thus tentatively for nine months. 
 
 In that period, by common consent, he did much 
 excellent public work, being a model member in every 
 respect. He knew the Rules of the House as they are 
 known only to the half-dozen men who at any moment 
 are in that respect qualified for the post of Speaker. 
 A large part of his work consisted in resisting the policy 
 of Coercion then followed by the Liberal Government in 
 Ireland. But that was not to avail to win for him much 
 Irish support. Already, on the day before his admission, 
 Parnell, who had undergone heavy pressure from his 
 priest-led adherents, who were supervised by Manning, 
 had declared that " he regarded the religious tenets of 
 Mr. Bradlaugh and his doctrines with reference to over- 
 population as abominable," and that " it was personally 
 an odious task for him to take the course he should on 
 this occasion " — this after he had gone to shake hands 
 with Bradlaugh after his arrest. At this price, he voted 
 for Gladstone's resolution. 
 
 It will probably be agreed that John Bright and 
 Henry Richard were considerably more religious men 
 than Parnell ; and they did not think it necessary to 
 abominate the opinions they did not share. Bright 
 fought the case on its political merits at every stage 
 with the fighting courage which belonged to him in a 
 supreme degree ; and at this juncture he threw out one 
 of the pronouncements which specially exasperated the 
 Conservative champions of the faith, observing that 
 " no man who watched what went on, on the first day 
 of the present Parliament, when hon. members were 
 squeezing round the table and scrambling for the New
 
 74 PARLIAMENTARY STRUGGLE 
 
 Tostamonts amid laughter — (' No, no,' and ministerial 
 choers) — no man could have watched that scene and 
 believed that the act had any of the solemnity of a 
 religious act about it." 
 
 There was no slackening in the furious storm outside. 
 As Lord Henry Lennox had avowed, it was the Conser- 
 vative tactic against the Liberals "to put that damned 
 Bradlaugh on them." Sir J. Eardley Wilmot even 
 introduced a bill to exclude atheists. Petitions in 
 support were largely signed, sometimes wholesale by 
 childron in Sunday schools. Personal libels abounded 
 in those years more than ever ; the watch story went 
 the rounds anew ; and Mrs. Besant and the Misses 
 Bradlaugh, who taught science classes in connection 
 with the South Kensington system of examinations, were 
 insulted by cowards inside the House and outside. Writs 
 for libel about the watch story elicited prompt and 
 abject apologies : the insults served to harden the fighting 
 temper of the freethinkers. Mr. Grantham, Q.G., M.P., 
 afterwards a judge, and before his death openly im- 
 peached in the House of Commons for his flagrant 
 political partisanship on the bench, made the allegation 
 that Bradlaugh gained -his living " by the circulation of 
 obscene literature"; and a Conservative member named 
 St. Aubyn pictured atheists as " holding indecent orgies 
 over the bodies of the dead" — this in a debate (in which 
 Bradlaugh forebore to speak) over the admission of 
 Nonconformist corpses to the Church graveyards. 
 Cardinal Manning, who in his work on The Present 
 Crisis of the Holy See had declared that England was 
 " the most anti-Catholic and therefore the most anti- 
 Christian power of the world," now declaimed in the 
 Nineteenth Century to the effect that the native religiosity 
 of the English people would not endure Agnostics in 
 Parliament, much less those whose theological position
 
 PARLIAMENTARY STRUGGLE 75 
 
 he proceeded deliriously to describe. Then as afterwards 
 Bradlaugh was refused space for a reply in the review. 
 But it should be always remembered that in June, 1880, 
 the " Home Government Association " of Glasgow passed 
 a resolution that "this meeting of Irish Roman Catholics" 
 expressed its " astonishment and indignation at the 
 cowardly acquiescence, and in a few instances active 
 support, on the part of a large majority of the Irish 
 Home Rule members " in the parliamentary action against 
 him. Some Protestant clergymen spoke out no less 
 manfully; but it was plain that a long battle lay ahead. 
 
 Immediately upon giving his first vote, just after 
 taking his seat, Bradlaugh w y as served with a previously 
 prepared writ to recover a penalty of £500 for illegal 
 voting. The suitor, one Clarke, was the tool of Mr. 
 Newdegate, M.P., an old opponent of the admission of 
 Jews to Parliament and a bitter anti-Catholic, now 
 combining with Jews and Catholics to deny civil rights 
 to the atheist. Other writs followed ; but the work was 
 left to Newdegate's employee. At length, on March 7, 
 1881, the action was heard in the Court of Queen's 
 Bench before Mr. Justice Mathew, a newly appointed 
 Roman Catholic, only that morning sworn-in. On the 
 11th judgment was given for the plaintiff, and Bradlaugh 
 applied for a stay of execution as to costs, with a view 
 to appeal. In the House Mr. Gorst and Lord Randolph 
 Churchill suggested that the aim was delay, and Brad- 
 laugh on March 23 moved the Court of Appeal to 
 expedite the hearing, which took place on the 30th, 
 before Lords Justices Bramwell, Baggallay, and Lush. 
 They rejected his contention that Clarke was not entitled 
 to sue, and supported the judgment of the lower Court, 
 Lord Justice Lush, however, assuring the appellant that 
 ho had argued his case "with great propriety as well as 
 great force." 
 
 G
 
 76 PARLIAMENTARY STRUGGLE 
 
 Bradlaugh's scat was now by law vacant, and he at 
 once stood for re-election. It was naturally a desperate 
 oontest, and, though the Conservative candidato was 
 feeble, " Oorbett and Christianity" served well enough 
 as an allitorative rallying cry, the more solid work being 
 done by an unmatchedly vile pamphlet of libels, com- 
 piled by one Varloy. " Some of my foes," wrote 
 Bradlaugh, " have been more foul than even I had 
 thought possible." But ho had by this time a percep- 
 tible measure of Press support, oven the Times saying a 
 word in his favour ; and he was re-elected (April 9, 1881) 
 by 3,437 votes against 3,305, having thus lost 390 since 
 the general election. On April 26 he again presented 
 himself at the table of the House. Northcote intimated 
 that he felt bound to act as before, and the committed 
 Speaker had to let him. The Liberal amendment was 
 ably moved by Mr. Davey, and Bright seconded with one 
 of the great speeches in which he combined the finest 
 hitting power with a nobility of tone and view which, 
 contrasted with the sheer currishness of the attack, 
 always recalled the image of the lion at bay. Replying 
 to ono of tho insults thrown out at Bradlaugh while he 
 spoke, he made the calm rejoinder : — 
 
 I can feel tho greatest charity for a member of 
 this House who in my opinion holds views on 
 religious matters which appear to mo so extra- 
 ordinary and so unfortunate There has been no 
 
 member of this House who has conducted himself 
 with greater propriety and decorum — (cheers) — and 
 he has brought to our discussions an average — 
 perhaps more than an averago — ability ; and there 
 is not a single word he has uttered, not a single act 
 he has committed, which in the slightest degree 
 ought to bar him from taking his place in this 
 assembly of gentlemen. (Cheers.) 
 
 But tho quotation,
 
 PARLIAMENTARY STRUGGLE 77 
 
 Bigotry may swell 
 The sail be sets for Heaven with blasts from Hell, 
 
 was not so well calculated to turn votes as to infuriate 
 tempers. 
 
 With difficulty had the Speaker obtained hearing for 
 Bradlaugh's claim to bo heard at the bar; but that 
 mysterious privilege was not withheld, and Bradlaugh 
 made his Second Speech at the Bar, which with the 
 others should be read by those who wish to figure the 
 scene and his personality. Gladstone, in a quiet speech, 
 suggested that the House was itself on its trial, and, 
 outgoing Bright, avowed of Bradlaugh that " his conduct 
 while he was on these benches was the conduct of a man 
 of great ability, integrity, and honour." And he quoted 
 a letter from Sir George Grey expressing "the fullest 
 conviction that the opposition to the taking of the oath 
 by Mr. Bradlaugh ought not to be permitted by the 
 Chair" — a view which the Speaker was thought by that 
 time partly to share. 
 
 But the fight had to go on. Northcote's motion was 
 carried by 208 votes to 175, the dmes damnies on the 
 Liberal and Irish benches holding their course ; and then 
 came the now inevitable scenes. Bradlaugh went to 
 the table as before, protesting and refusing to withdraw ; 
 the helpless Speaker asked for instructions ; and the 
 helpless Northcote sparred feebly with Gladstone, who 
 refused to interfere. On the Speaker explaining that 
 the order to withdraw extended only to the bar, Brad- 
 laugh strategically withdrew to that position ; and the 
 leaders went on sparring, Northcote feebly and Gladstone 
 indignantly, till Mr. Cowen moved the adjournment of 
 the House, which was eagerly assented to as the one 
 way out — for the moment. Next day, of course, the 
 scene recommenced, Bradlaugh going to the table and 
 retiring to the bar as before. Labouchero, moving the
 
 78 PAUL1 AMENTABY STEUGGLE 
 
 adjournment of the House, asked for facilities for his 
 Affirmation Bill ; Gladstone was elaborately willing, 
 provided the Bill was not to be resisted by the Opposi- 
 tion ; and the sorely burdened Northcoto, personally 
 willing to let it pass, could not answer for his followers. 
 Bright spoke with his unfailing force; a Mr. Hubbard 
 tearfully invoked the police ; Newdegato offered to act 
 personally ; Mr. Chaplin, with a courteous compliment 
 to Bradlaugh, explained that they must stand by the 
 Supremo Being whose guidance they invoked at prayers, 
 without however asserting that they were visibly getting 
 it ; others contributed equally valuable reflections ; and 
 one sage intimated that he would introduce a measure 
 for the partial disfranchisement of Northampton. At 
 length tho motion for adjournment was by leave with- 
 drawn, and Bradlaugh consented to withdraw, to await 
 tho decision of the Government. 
 
 It came soon, in an announcement of an Affirmation 
 Bill, which Churchill proceeded to oppose at every stage, 
 while Bradlaugh issued an Appeal to the People and 
 held a great meeting at Northampton. " This I do 
 pledge myself," he declared at the close, " that if health 
 do keep and life do hold, I will never give way " ; and for 
 whole minutes the meeting thundered its pledge in 
 answer. He then rose and asked, " Will you stand by 
 me in this fight?" and when every hand went up in 
 a new hurricane of cheers he ended : " Then, on my 
 honour, if I live, we will win." The pledge and the 
 prophecy were to be fulfilled, to the humiliation of the 
 shamed House of Commons, but at the price of the 
 shortened life of the champion of constitutional liberties. 
 
 In the House the Affirmation Bill staggered on a slow 
 course. Northcote pitifully yielded to his bullies ; and 
 Mr. Balfour, entering foi tho first time into tho con- 
 troversy, demurred to legislation for the relief of one
 
 PAELIAMENTAEY STEUGGLE 79 
 
 man. On a division tho Government won by only six 
 votes. After prolonged obstruction the Government 
 suspendod the Bill ; and when Bradlaugh presented 
 himself next day to bring matters to a head, Gladstone 
 assented to a motion by Northcote that he should bo 
 removed by the Sergeant-at-Arms from the House until 
 he should engage " not to further disturb the pro- 
 ceedings." Bradlaugh decided to hold back until the 
 Irish Land Bill had got through the House. Meantime 
 the battle went on outside. As a rule, newspaper 
 attacks on him wore anonymous; but an Anti- Atheistic 
 Committee was formed, with the name of Sir Bartlc 
 Frere, of pro-consular memory, on its prospectus. It 
 held a ticket meeting in Exeter Hall, for which, by the 
 avowal of a magistrate member, six prize-fighters were 
 engaged to " stop the mouths of Mr. Bradlaugh's friends 
 with their fists." Still, the promoters, by the avowal of 
 Canon Taylor, were sadly disappointed in the audience. 
 Bradlaugh, on the other hand, held a score of open 
 meetings in the large towns ; and one on his behalf 
 arranged by the Constitutional Eights League, held in 
 St. James's Hall and packed to the door, was addressed 
 by speakers including three clergymen, without a dis- 
 sentient vote being given. Two clergymen in particular — 
 the Eev. Mr. Sharman of Plymouth, Nonconformist, and 
 the Eev. Stewart Headlam of London, Anglican — deserve 
 naming here for their constant fortitude on the side of 
 political justice. Some prominent Liberals thought fit 
 to censure the fighter. To balance, Mr. Goldwin Smith 
 made a vigorous attack on tho persecutors, declaring that 
 :: the ringleaders are scamps," and that the legal decision 
 given was " to the shame of British civilization and 
 religion." 
 
 More concrete fighting proceeded in the law courts, 
 where Bradlaugh was gradually getting in hand the
 
 PAELIAMENTAEY STRUGGLE 
 
 Newdegate litigation. Tho Clarke writ had in point of 
 fact been takon out before Bradlaugh bad voted, 
 Newdegate being afraid of the bringing of a friendly 
 action. Qnder cross-examination, Newdegate and his 
 witnesses visibly and grossly prevaricated. Tbo principal 
 bad given a bond of "maintenance" to Clarke, who had 
 no means of his own to meet costs. In tho argument 
 over the time of issue of the writ Bradlaugh extracted 
 from Newdegato the confession that he had given a bond 
 of indemnity to Clarke ; and now the tables were to bo 
 turned, Bradlaugh bringing against Newdegate a 
 "criminal" action for "maintenance," and, at the 
 samo time, appealing for a new trial on tho question of 
 the writ, on tho ground that the verdict was against tho 
 weight of the evidence. The magistrate who dealt with 
 the criminal summons for "maintenance" had the 
 effrontery to censure Bradlaugh for " unfriendly feeling " 
 towards the man who was zealously trying to ruin him, 
 and dismissed tho summons, alleging that the procedure 
 was obsolete. At once Bradlaugh raised a civil action. 
 The end was not reached till 1883. On bis appeal 
 against the decision as to the validity of a writ issued on 
 the day of the ground of action, tho judges supported the 
 lower court. On the pleading for a new trial as to tho 
 actual hour of issue of the writ ho won ; and Clarke and 
 Newdogate, after vacillation, decided to appeal against 
 that, having good reason to dread it. They in turn won, 
 the decision of tho judges (Brett, Cotton, and Holker) 
 eliciting some grave legal comment outside. Bradlaugh 
 had then to pay £500 into court as for the penalty, 
 obtaining respite only as to costs, besides giving securities 
 for large sums on his appeals to tho House of Lords ; 
 and his enemies were very hopeful of his financial ruin. 
 A friendly action brought from Northampton was barred 
 by decision of Justices Manisty and Watkin Williams,
 
 PARLIAMENTARY STRUGGLE 81 
 
 which again elicited hostile legal comment. Yet other 
 actions emerged — one hy Bradlaugh against the Deputy 
 Sergeant-at-Arms, which he lost. At this stage he 
 had five actions on hand at one time (tho Freethinker 
 prosecutions, descrihed later, having intervened to com- 
 plicate his personal struggle), and his debts were 
 mounting, swallowing up two legacies. But at last the 
 fortune of the war began to change. 
 
 In March, 1884, the appeal in the original Clarke case 
 was heard in the House of Lords, and in April their 
 lordships decided for Bradlaugh, with costs, on the 
 finding that Clarke ("maintenance" apart) had no legal 
 title to sue for penalties. A fortnight later Lord Chief 
 Justice Coleridge gave judgment in the maintenance case, 
 deciding not merely that Newdegate's case fell with 
 Clarke's, but that, on the merits, Newdegate's action 
 must be held illegal unless the law on maintenance was 
 to be set aside. After speaking gravely and weightily of 
 his responsibilities on the religious side of the case, his 
 lordship gave a general decision in Bradlaugh's favour 
 as to the mass of costs. Thus was the long battle won 
 on this wing. Newdegate gave notice of appeal, but 
 abandoned it. Seeking to ruin Bradlaugh, he had 
 brought himself into serious financial straits. 
 
 But while the litigation had been under way Bradlaugh 
 had suffered the worst stress of the parliamentary battle 
 proper. On July 2, 1881, Gladstone had definitely 
 intimated to him that the Government had no hope of 
 carrying their Oaths Bill in that session after the Irish 
 Land Bill. At once Bradlaugh prepared for fresh 
 hostilities, respectfully notifying the Speaker of his 
 intention, and pointing out that the excluding order of 
 May 10 did not authorize the Sergeant-at-Arms to use 
 force. To Northcote he addressed an open letter in 
 mordant terms, to which Northcote made a feeble
 
 PARLIAMENTARY STRUGGLE 
 
 osive reply. With his litigations in full swing, 
 Bradlaugh at onco resumed his platform campaign, 
 speaking at many demonstrations and mass meetings, 
 and everywhere getting enthusiastic support. At length, 
 on August 3, he went to the House, a great host of his 
 followers standing outside. Refused admission to tho 
 House by tho regular officials, ho pressed on, declaring 
 that he was fulfilling his duty to his constituents, and 
 accurately warning them that any one laying hands on 
 him would do so at his peril. The Houso messengers 
 being unequal to the task, ten powerful constables, 
 aided by four of the messengers, in accordance with plans 
 concerted with Northcote, were set upon him ; and in a 
 ih of fury at the ignoble device he resisted with all 
 the strength of a groat frame not yet broken down by 
 his toils. The ton gladiators had a terrific task, 
 struggling desperately down the lobby stairs and all tho 
 way to the entrance. Newspaper reports give a viow of 
 tho close of the scene, which was eagerly followed by 
 gleeful groups of Conservative gentlemen : — 
 
 The sight, little of it as was to be seen from the 
 
 outside, soon became sickening An almost death- 
 
 liko pallor had spread over Mr. Bradlaugh's sternly- 
 set features ; he was gasping for breath, his body 
 was bent, and ho was in a state of exhaustion 
 painful to see. His black frockcoat was much torn, 
 his collar and shirt disarranged, and ho himself in 
 a condition of intense mental excitement and bodily 
 
 prostration The Trafalgar Squaro phrase [of the 
 
 day before] that this man might be broken but not 
 bent occurred to minds apprehensive at the present 
 
 appearance of him His face was deathly white, 
 
 and there was about the mouth an expression of 
 determination which those who witnessed it cannot 
 readily forget. Overborne by the desperate struggle 
 he fainted, but soon recovered when water was 
 brought to him.
 
 PARLIAMENTARY STRUGGLE 83 
 
 One word from him, or from Mrs. Besant, who stood 
 with a large mass at another door, would have sent the 
 host of his friends — -thousands of them keen artisans 
 from all parts of the country- — into the House to eject 
 its members, or at least tho wretched ringleaders, into 
 the Thames if necessary. Many never ceased to regret 
 that he did not give the word. But he knew better. 
 In the moment of supreme outrage and supreme tempta- 
 tion he held to his faith in law and order, forbade all 
 outbreak, and merely proceeded to make a formal show 
 of attempt to re-enter by way of legal ground for a fresh 
 action. In the evening he spoke at tho Hall of Science, 
 commanding his frionds to avoid all violence ; whereafter 
 he went off for treatment of the erysipelas set up in one 
 of his arms (of which several small muscles were 
 ruptured) — the arm that had similarly suffered from the 
 Tory bludgeons in 1878. It was said in the House that 
 several of the ten policemen were even worse damaged, 
 requiring prolonged leave and hospital treatment. Later 
 a working-man's wife from Northampton embarrassed 
 the entire force acutely by congratulating them on the 
 splendid victory of fourteen over one, and condoling with 
 those who had suffered most from " that awful grip," 
 which had nearly dislocated some of their necks. But 
 for Bradlaugh the frightful struggle probably meant the 
 shortening of his life by some years. 
 
 In the House, after the usual rambling discussion, an 
 approving resolution was carried. Bradlaugh went on 
 with his law-suits. An application for a summons 
 against the police inspector in respect of the final formal 
 and courteous denial of admittance was refused by the 
 magistrate. The Tory press and platform behaved after 
 their wont, and the contemptibles of all parties swelled 
 the coward censure of the ministerial journals which 
 elected to blame the victim instead of the villains of the
 
 81 PARLIAMENTARY STRUGGLE 
 
 piece. But the bettor part of Liberalism inevitably 
 rallied to the right ; and the Rev. E. D. Girdlestone sent 
 Bradlaugh a noble letter of indignant sympathy. " If 
 the present Cabinot," ho wrote, " does not secure your 
 admission to the House in some way or othor, I can 
 only wish they may be turned out of oflice. The name 
 of ' Christian ' and the religion of ' Christ,' which I 
 venerate, they make odious. As if Christianity could 
 ever be less than common justice. I don't know what 
 more I can do than say, ' Go on !' and ' Go on ! "' The 
 then Lord Derby, speaking at the Liverpool Reform 
 Club, avowed his utter disbelief in the value of political 
 oaths, and appealed for a decent solution. 
 
 At the opening of the new session of 1882 Bradlaugh 
 went to the table as usual, with the usual opposition 
 from Northcote, who now committed himself to the "no 
 binding effect" argument. Bradlaugh withdrew as 
 before to the bar, where, after the customary futile 
 debate, he made his Third Speech at the Bar, in which 
 he offered to stand aside for a month if the House would 
 in that time discuss an Affirmation Bill. If they 
 demurred to making it a Bradlaugh Relief Bill, he would 
 resign his seat and stand for re-election. The old kind 
 of debate followed, Labouchere fighting with his un- 
 wavering staunchness ; and Northcote's usual motion 
 was carried by 286 to 228 against the Government's 
 "previous question." Again Bradlaugh came forward, 
 Northcote moved, and Bradlaugh retired below the bar, 
 where he was now loft to do as ho would ! At this 
 stage he had so far won that he could attend every 
 sitting provided he did not pass the bar, and could uso 
 the library and the rest of the House at his pleasure ! 
 
 After he had appealed to his constituents to choose 
 whether or not he would resign, and being answered as 
 was to be expected, thirty indignation meetings in his
 
 PARLIAMENTARY STRUGGLE 85 
 
 support were held throughout the country in a week. 
 Gladstone declaring himself unable to do anything, 
 Labouchere moved for a new writ, on the score that 
 the seat was being made void ; Churchill moved an 
 amendment describing Bradlaugh as disqualified ; but 
 the Government and Northcoto opposed ; and on a form 
 of motion left truncated and verbally quite meaningless 
 the House divided, 307 vetoing Labouchero's proposal 
 against eighteen "Ayes." Once more Bradlaugh went 
 to the table, and to the astonishment of the members, 
 who looked languidly for a repetition of the old moves, 
 he rapidly took the oath on a New Testament in the 
 regulation form. The whole thing, signing of the oath 
 form included, was done before the House could collect 
 its faculties. Northcote was speechless ; the Speaker, 
 however, gave the usual command, upon which Brad- 
 laugh went to the bar as of old, but announced that he 
 would return, and did so, seating himself on a back 
 bench ; then, after further discussion, retiring below the 
 bar and sitting below the gallery, leaving everything 
 " at sea " as before. Next day there w T as new debate 
 and a new scene ; Gladstone blandly declining to do 
 anything, despite furious Tory taunts ; Northcote flabbily 
 proposing strong measures ; Bradlaugh again sitting 
 within the House and again withdrawing ; and all ended 
 in a vote for expulsion and an agreed motion for a new 
 writ for Northampton, the seat being declared vacant. 
 
 Again the seat was fought, and again Bradlaugh won. 
 Mr. Samuel Morley abjectly wrote to the Northampton 
 Nonconformists, adjuring them to vote Tory " as an act 
 of allegiance to God," whereupon the Radical Association 
 of Bristol resolved to unseat Mr. Samuel Morley, and 
 sent to Northampton 3,000 copies of an address exhort- 
 ing the electors to return Bradlaugh. Both sides 
 strained every nerve, and the Tory side every principle
 
 86 PARLIAMENTARY STRUGGLE 
 
 of honour and decency ; but once more " Corbett and 
 Christianity" were defeated (March 2, 1882), this time 
 by a majority of only 108, which, however, was enough 
 to make the Christian candidate declare to some unsym- 
 pathetic voters : " I shan't come back to your dirty town 
 any more" — a promise faithfully kept. In the House 
 Hie battle was resumed with all its "confused noise." 
 In a debate opened by Northcote, Mr. Marjoribanks, 
 speaking to an amendment on behalf of the Gladstone 
 Government, was freshly and insolently offensive. 
 Labouch ere undertook on Bradlaugh's behalf that if it 
 were agreed to introduco fresh legislation he would 
 absent himself until a decision was come to ; but in the 
 division twolve Liberals and twenty-six Irish Homo 
 Rulers supported Northcote, many others stayed away, 
 and Northcote's motion was carried by 259 votes to 21!. 
 Bradlaugh, setting in motion anew his machinery of 
 agitation, at this stage pointed out very courteously but 
 unanswerably that the Speaker had entangled himself in 
 contradictory decisions as to the "privilege" of moving 
 for an election writ and on various other points. But 
 beside the collective and virulent imbecility of the 
 majority of the House the Speaker was rather a pathetic 
 than an obnoxious figure ; and beside the Tory press he 
 was as Hyperion to a satyr. The Saturday Review 
 explained to its flock that the average Northampton 
 elector was of the type of the last man who had tried 
 to shoot the Queen, and the Evening Standard described 
 Bradlaugh's supporters as collectively bent on picking 
 pockets at their open-air demonstrations. Cardinal 
 Manning, allowed a free hand in tlio Nineteenth Cento 
 awoke in many Rationalists a now temper of detestation 
 towards his Church ; and an illegal visit by him to 
 Northampton in prolatic state revived such sentiment 
 even in highly orthodox quarters. After tho Cardinal's
 
 PARLIAMENTARY STRUGGLE 87 
 
 third article Bradlaugh produced a pamphlet entitled 
 A Cardinal's Broken Oath, in which the prelate was 
 smitten on the mouth in such a fashion that ho there- 
 after held his peace. He had, as Bradlaugh pointed out, 
 violated his own elaborately solemn oath as an Anglican 
 priest to abhor, detest, and abjure the claims of Rome. 
 The circumstance that his chief Catholic henchman in 
 the House, Philip Callan, was chronically drunk, was 
 not lost sight of. Translated into Italian and carefully 
 circulated at Rome and elsewhere, the tract had a distin- 
 guished audience. The incomparably greater Cardinal, 
 Newman, wrote to a correspondent in 1883 concerning 
 the Affirmation Bill that in his opinion " nothing would 
 be lost to religion by its passing, and nothing gained by 
 its being rejected." 
 
 At this stage even Conservative protests emerged 
 One Conservative wrote a pamphlet in Bradlaugh's 
 favour, and another, avowing that he put self-respect 
 before party, sent an open letter of stinging criticism to 
 Northcote, calling his attention to the numerous latitu- 
 dinarian priests in the Church, " including the father- 
 in-law of your own son, Canon Farrar," and predicting 
 that Bradlaugh's name would survive when those of the 
 Conservative leaders were forgotten. But Conservative 
 zeal was not to be thus controlled. A new move to ruin 
 Bradlaugh was made by Sir Henry Tyler, who had dis- 
 tinguished himself by insulting Mrs. Besant and the 
 Misses Bradlaugh, and who, as one journal pointed out, 
 sat for "one of the smallest and most corrupt con- 
 stituencies in England." It being impossible to convict 
 Bradlaugh of " blasphemy " in any passable sense from 
 his own writings or his journal, it was sought to implicate 
 him in a prosecution set up against the Freethinker , 
 which was sold at the shop of the Freethought 
 Publishing Company, of which he and Mrs. Besant were
 
 88 PARLIAMENTARY STRUGGLE 
 
 the partners. No ease was ever more foully fought, the 
 prosecutors obtaining from the Lord Mayor power to 
 inspect Bradlaugh's bank book. As against him the 
 prosocution ultimately failed ; but on a separate prosecu- 
 tion G. W. Foote, editor, William Ramsey, publisher, 
 and Henry Arthur Kemp, shopman, were by Mr. Justice 
 North sentenced in March, 1883, to a year's imprisonment 
 for blasphemy in respect of certain woodcuts in a 
 Christmas number of their journal. The sentence 
 provoked an unprecedented outbreak of indignation from 
 the audience in the court, and immensely widened the 
 acceptance given to the prosecuted journal. The same 
 judge had let off with threo months' imprisonment a 
 ruffian who had killed, by a kick on the face, a coffee- 
 stall keeper who refused him a second cup of coffee until 
 he had paid for the first. Bradlaugh did on this occasion 
 what he had never done before, addressing a public letter 
 of reprobation to the judge. 
 
 The original action, in which Bradlaugh had been con- 
 joined, came on soon afterwards, he being permitted by 
 Lord Coleridge to have the charge against him tried 
 separately. He was acquitted, despito the pious 
 eloquence of Sir Hardinge Giifard, the jury returning a 
 verdict of " Not Guilty," which elicited loud cheers from 
 the audience, echoed in many journals. When the 
 original case against Foote and Ramsey (alroady con- 
 victed on the second prosecution) came before Lord 
 Coleridge, he treated them very considerately and depre- 
 cated persecution, but admitted the incidence of the law 
 of blasphemy. The jury disagreed, and the case was 
 dropped ; but the prisoners nonetheless underwent the 
 sentence inflicted by Mr. Justice North. At that time 
 Lord Coleridge's own admired friend, Matthew Arnold, 
 was certainly indictable for the blasphemy of picturing 
 the Holy Trinity as "three Lord Shaftesburys " ; but
 
 PARLIAMENTAEY STRUGGLE 89 
 
 Christian law has latterly been in these matters a great 
 respecter of persons. 
 
 Successful in three decisive aotions, Bradlaugh made 
 a fresh push in the parliamentary campaign in the new 
 session of 1883, announcing his intention as usual to the 
 Speaker. At last, however, the Government undertook to 
 introduce an Affirmation Bill ; which was perhaps as 
 well, for Bradlaugh was appealed to by the police- 
 inspector to reassure the multitude outside, who were 
 angrily apprehensive of fresh violence against him. The 
 Tory opposition was strenuous. Half a million signa- 
 tures to petitions against his admission had been 
 obtained by the combined machinery of the Anglican and 
 Catholic Churches, the great majority being those of 
 school children and coerced employees. In the debates 
 the son of Northcote called Bradlaugh's supporters a 
 mob of unwashed ruffians ; Wolff accused Lord 
 Chancellor Selborne of using his position to help his 
 party ; and Churchill said the same thing of Lord Chief- 
 Justice Coleridge. Gladstone, for his part, made the 
 great speech in which he cited the " noble and majestic 
 lines " of Lucretius, picturing the untroubled life of the 
 Epicurean Gods, a belief in whom, or in any such Deity, 
 would have sufficed the Churchill crew as a title to sit 
 in the House of Commons ; as would the Deism of 
 Voltaire, whose war-cry against the persecuting Church 
 was Ecrasez I'lnfdme. "Voltaire would not have had 
 the slightest difficulty in taking your oath ; and yet that 
 is the state of the law for which you are working up the 
 country to madness." Churchill, who had declared that 
 a belief in " some divinity or other " was a religious 
 requisite, gave a fresh sample of his quality in a 
 description of Bradlaugh's supporters as "the residuum, 
 the rabble, and the scum of the population." In a 
 retaliatory tractate, Bradlaugh, who held the memory of
 
 90 P A R L T AME N T A II Y ST R UG G LB 
 
 the great Marlborough in abhorrence, returned the asper- 
 sion with interest. A few years later, whon Bradlaugh 
 sat, immovable by any tactics, Churchill, leading the 
 House and conscious of his incapacities, cringed for 
 Bradlaugh's friendly treatment. 
 
 Bill was defeated (May 3) by 292 votes to 289, to 
 the frenzied delight of tho Tories and the Irish Home 
 Rulers, one of the latter shouting that "the Irish have 
 beaten Bradlaugh." The " beaten " one simply resumed 
 his campaign, presenting himself next day as usual, and 
 making his Fourth Speech at the Bar, in which he men- 
 tioned in passing that Callan had on the previous day 
 used "filthy and blasphemous" language towards 
 another Irish member who proposed to voto for the Bill. 
 Passing to higher things, he ended with a peroration of 
 noble dignity, which elicited loud Liberal cheers. 
 Labouchere, taking the bull by the horns, pointed, 
 without using his name, but in unmistakable terms, to 
 the case of Mr. John Morley, who had actually taken the 
 oath, and against whom the Tories would gladly have 
 proceeded but for the knowledge that there were atheists 
 on their own side. The bold challenge was studiously 
 ignored, and Labouehere's motion of "the previous 
 question " was duly defeated. 
 
 Outside, Bradlaugh once more went through tho 
 country, addressing over 300,000 people in the course of a 
 few months, and raising a higher tide of indignation than 
 ever. Mrs. Besant had beon insultingly refused the use 
 of the Royal Botanic Society's garden for her botanical 
 studios; tho Misses Bradlaugh were as insultingly 
 refused membership of the Somervillo (Women's) Club ; 
 and all three were denied admittance to tho Practical 
 Botany class at University College, which had been 
 expressly founded to dispense with religious qualifica- 
 tions. When, on a memorial to tho Council signed by
 
 PAELIAMENTAEY STKUGGLB 91 
 
 Huxley, Bain, Tylor, and other leading men, an extra- 
 ordinary general meeting was hold to consider the 
 question, the medical graduates came in overwhelming 
 numbers to support the action taken, and only nine 
 votod against. Medicine had rallied loyally to the 
 Church; and Mr. Justice Denman published the false- 
 hood that the ladies had " refused to comply with tho 
 rules of the College." 
 
 Bradlaugh's next move was to notify a fresh appear- 
 ance ; and, whon Northcote's usual motion was carried, 
 to inform the Sergeant-at-Arms that if the latter would 
 say he interpreted the order for oxclusion to involve the 
 use of physical force, he would take legal proceedings to 
 test the right of the House to exclude him. This was 
 done, the Treasury defending, with the result that the 
 judges (Coleridge, Stephen, and Mathew) decided 
 (February 9, 1884) against his claim, explaining that "if 
 injustice has been done it is an injustice for which 
 the courts of law afford no remedy." Expecting this 
 judgment, Bradlaugh had arranged through his colleague 
 that no action was to be taken against him until ho 
 presented himself at the House on February 11, once 
 more to administer the oath to himself, with Labouchere 
 and Thomas Burt as his introducers. The Speaker took 
 the usual course, followed by the usual debate, which, 
 however, Labouchere now signalized by declaring in good 
 set terms that he regarded the oath (which he had taken) 
 as an utterly unmeaning form, "just the same super- 
 stitious incantation as the trash of any Mumbo-Jumbo 
 among African savages." Mixed laughter and outcry 
 greeted a declaration which reduced the " sanctity of the 
 oath " once for all to farce. The Tories did not dare 
 proceed against Labouchere, knowing that if they did he 
 would publish in Truth the names of the Tory atheists 
 in tho House. 
 
 H
 
 92 PAELIAMENTAEY STRUGGLE 
 
 New debate followed on the "motion to exclude," 
 which was now made to apply to " the precincts of the 
 House." Northcote was at that stage exhibited by the 
 caricaturists as playing pantaloon to Churchill's clown ; 
 and he fully earned the description. After offering to 
 observe quiescence till his law case was settled, and being 
 mot by the carrying of the Northcote motion, Bradlaugh 
 applied for tho " Chiltorn Hundreds," wheroupon 
 Churchill, who had laboured in vain to have him 
 declared incapable in perpetuity of sitting, movod tho 
 adjournment of tho debate upon Labouchero's motion for 
 a new writ. This was defeated, and Bradlaugh went to 
 a fourth election, which he won with an increased 
 majority — 4,032 to 3,664. After the utmost stress of 
 struggle, he had passed the worst. On his resump- 
 tion of the wrestle with the House, Northcote, 
 amid cries of " Shame," moved his exclusion from 
 tho precincts, and this was carried ; Churchill ex- 
 hibiting his utmost virulence, and tho demoralized 
 majority its utmost cowardice. " You wear knightly 
 orders," wrote Bradlaugh to Northcote in a contemp- 
 tuous open letter ; " you should be above a knave's 
 spitefulness." 
 
 In June, 1884, the Government's law-suit on the 
 validity of his self-administered oath was tried bofore 
 three judges (Coleridge, Grove, and Huddleston) " sitting 
 at bar," with a jury, to wdiich were put eight questions 
 of circumstantial and legal fact ; and the findings and 
 verdict were against him. Stoically fighting on, he 
 moved for a new trial, which came on in December, tho 
 judges now sitting in banc, which, he had argued, they 
 ought to have done before. Again the judges, who 
 argued the case with him very fully, were against him, 
 deciding in effect that they could not infer any wish on 
 the part of past legislators to regard an atheist as having
 
 PAELIAMENTAEY STRUGGLE 93 
 
 any civic rights, whatever they might think of " Lucre- 
 tian" theists. In vain did Bradlaugh point out the 
 absurdity of the existing system, in which the first forty 
 members sworn in a new Parliament are bound to break 
 the law, since they swear while there is not a "full 
 House" sitting. Incidentally it was laid down that any 
 non-believer in a falsehood-punishing Deity could bo 
 enormously penalized, after swearing, for his votes. But 
 nobody pretended that the law was thus to bo enforced 
 against anybody but Bradlaugh. 
 
 In 1885 an attempt by Mr. Hopwood to carry an 
 Affirmation Bill came to nothing, the Government 
 refusing to tempt another defeat, though the Liberal 
 Conference of 1881 had unanimously declared for 
 Northampton's rights. When, on the defeat of the 
 Gladstone Ministry in July, 1885, the Conservatives 
 took office, Bradlaugh presented himself ; the new leader 
 of the House, Sir Michael Hicks Beach, followed the 
 old course; and Parnell and Mr. Healy distinguished 
 themselves by proposing Bradlaugh's preliminary exclu- 
 sion. A few years only had to pass ere the two Irish 
 exclusionistswere at each other's throats in the break-up 
 of their own party. But the situation was now dissolving 
 in Parliament. The new general election was at hand ; 
 and in that the Liberal voting at Northampton stood : 
 Labouchere, 4,815 ; Bradlaugh, 1,315 ; Tory, 3,890. The 
 game of bigotry was up. A round dozen of the Liberal 
 recreants, including Mr. Samuel Morley, lost their seats, 
 on the declared ground of their action in the Northamp- 
 ton question. Several Tory and Irish " malignants," 
 including Wolff and Earl Percy, met the same fate, and 
 Newdegate withdrew to avoid certain defeat. Even 
 some Tory members had to pledge themselves to support 
 an Affirmation Bill. 
 
 But the new Speaker, Mr. Peel, settled the question
 
 94 PAELIAMENTAEY STEUGGLE 
 
 out of hand. In the now House he peremptorily and 
 absolutely rofused to allow any membor, leading or 
 other, to interfere between another member and the 
 oath, declaring that ho, as Speaker, had no right to 
 allow suoh an interference. Thus ho stultified once and 
 for all the whole previous action of tho House and that 
 of his predecessor in tho Chair, and no one could say 
 him nay. The Houso which had played the bully 
 through five-and-a-half years was with consummate 
 decision reduced to law by its own supreme officer, 
 neither of tho two great parties being ablo to claim the 
 honour of having at last conformed to the plain principles 
 of tho constitution. The action of Mr. Speaker Peel, 
 which Bradlaugh witnessed with an amused admiration, 
 gives him a permanent prominence in the long line of 
 the holders of his august office. But it was perhaps 
 only the clear evidenco of the general defeat of tho bigots 
 in tho election that dictated the submission of tho 
 humiliated bigots in the House. By their own declara- 
 tion tho oath was " trampled upon." They had witlessly 
 willed it. 
 
 In due time (1888) Bradlaugh carried his own Affirma- 
 tion Bill, other men's attempts having failod. Thus ho 
 consummated the great fight, tho winning of which mado 
 him prematurely old. It will be obvious to any reflecting 
 reader that only his unique combination of courage, 
 lighting power, invincible resolution, and legal skill could 
 have achieved such a result in such circumstances. The 
 first three qualifications would have been insufficient 
 without the fourth ; it was by a five-years' war in the 
 law courts that Bradlaugh saved the legal liberties of 
 English constituencies, at the constant risk of his own 
 financial ruin. But not the ablest lawyers in England 
 would have dreamt of fighting such a battle in such a 
 cause ; it needed the heroic heart to dream of facing it.
 
 PARLIAMENTARY STRUGGLE 95 
 
 And tins it was, when all is said, that hold to him tho 
 unyielding adherence of the effective " stalwarts " 
 throughout tho electorate. It is only the stupidity 
 generated by malice that could have blinded any large 
 number of practical politicians to the folly of braving 
 the ineradicable spirit of justice in tho mass of a frco 
 nation. If thero is one thing to which in all ages 
 Englishmen in general cordially respond, it is courage ; 
 and here was the supreme case of courage in the public 
 life of a generation. One man had wrestled with tho 
 House of Commons through six years. Month after 
 month and year after year he had fought the whole 
 herded forces of religious malice and Tory brutality, 
 standing in an unending storm of venomous abuse, 
 always in the front of the fight, conducting his own 
 gigantic and incessant law-suits, addressing a perpetual 
 series of great open meetings, breaching at every new 
 crisis the coward-castle of the majority in the House of 
 Commons, fighting them to a standstill again and again, 
 holding his seat through five pitched battles in the teeth 
 of the concentrated efforts of all the banded bigotries of 
 England. Such a figure and such a fight inspirited and 
 thrilled every man in whom fanaticism had not impaired 
 manhood. Had he gone down, the defeat would have 
 cheapened the character of his race ; and all over the 
 world its best blood responded to him against his hosts 
 of rabid enemies. To him and to his helpers fell the 
 honours of the fight, the very memory of which is a 
 shame to the factions, religious and political, which 
 opposed him. And the total episode left certain enduring 
 differences in the public life and the culture life of the 
 nation. 
 
 Two broad inferences were drawn from the phenomena 
 of the Bradlaugh struggle by many people who had not 
 generalized to the same effect in the past. One was
 
 9G PARLIAMENTARY STRUGGLE 
 
 that religious belief largely works out in political practice 
 as a corrupter of character. The other was that the 
 political party which claimed to be specially that of 
 'English gentlemen" bad exhibited collectively, with 
 hardly one eminent exception, the apparent possible 
 maximum of all ungcntlemanliness. 
 
 Bradlaugh, who keenly scrutinized his enemies and 
 estimated them in the mass philosophically even at the 
 height of his struggle, always said that there had occurred 
 in the matter a contagion of demoralization such as 
 affects a mob, whose members will collectively commit 
 heedless brutalities of which most of them would bo 
 singly incapable. Parties in Parliament, he observed, 
 tended to develop the mob spirit (a truth at times 
 exemplified in later years) ; and men normally gentlemen 
 literally " forgot themselves." As a practical fighter he 
 had, of course, a passing human satisfaction in striking 
 his hardest at men like Manning and Churchill, who 
 used the advantages of place and birth to strike like 
 caitiffs. But he was incapable of class hatred. He had 
 had tho corrective experience of base enmity from some 
 men of his own professed opinions, and generous cham- 
 pionship from some who were on the other side in 
 matters of religion; and he never fanaticized moral 
 standards. Other observers, without his provocations, 
 were less lenient. A new element of hostility to 
 Conservatism entered into political life, and the party 
 was sensibly curtailed of prestige. 
 
 In regard to the religious side of the struggle 
 Bradlaugh was at least equally judicial. The platoon of 
 prominent men of unquestioned Christian faith who hud 
 all along stood by him in the battle over the oath were 
 ever before his eyes, as was the fact that nine-tenths of 
 the electors who voted for him were orthodox ; and so 
 far from putting any new passion into his criticism of
 
 PARLIAMENTARY STRUGGLE 97 
 
 religion, ho became more measured, more strictly scien- 
 tific. The hysteria of battle he never knew, save in the 
 one moment of fierce resentment of Northcote's trick of 
 having him ejected by physical force. Resentment may 
 have steeled but it never poisoned his heart, or embittered 
 his philosophy. Nothing, however, could hinder that for 
 multitudes of his fellow freethinkers the struggle should 
 give a new edge to their weapons, a new hardness to 
 their polemic temper ; and the arraignment of Christian 
 creed, literature, ethics, and history that proceeded on 
 the Secularist platform during those and some subsequent 
 years was such as probably to make many more converts 
 to Rationalism than Bradlaugh had won in his thirty. 
 The faith lost in something like exact proportion to the 
 stress of the malice of its adherents ; for the counter- 
 attack took on the keen coolness of spirit that befits a 
 small force fighting against brute numbers. Organized 
 Christianity had become newly contemptible, and was so 
 exhibited. Gladstone's estimate may be allowed to have 
 weight. Speaking in the House of Commons on the day 
 after Bradlaugh's funeral, on a minor Bill of his own for 
 Removal of Religious Disabilities, he said :— 
 
 A distinguished man and admirable member of 
 this House was laid yesterday in his mother earth. 
 He was the subject of a long controversy in this 
 House— a controversy the beginning of which we 
 recollect, and the ending of which we recollect. We 
 remember with what zeal it was prosecuted ; we 
 remember how summarily it was dropped : we 
 remember, also, what reparation has been done 
 within the last few days to the distinguished man 
 who was the immediate object of that controversy. 
 But does anybody who hears me believe that that 
 controversy, so prosecuted and so abandoned, was 
 beneficial to the Christian religion ? 
 
 No public man has ever been known to reply in the
 
 98 PARLIAMENTARY STRUGGLE 
 
 affirmative. Thoro was, indeed, in the sequel to the 
 Brad laugh hattle a bizarre semblance of retribution, 
 which, had he been an orthodox martyr, would certainly 
 have been turned to edifying account. Of all his foremost 
 assailants, not ono politically prospered. Sir Edward 
 Clarke, who had insisted on treating the oath question as 
 ono not of law but of opinion, lived to be cold-shouldered 
 by his fellow Conservatives ; and Mr. Marjoribanks, who 
 in his character of Liberal Whip had thought fit to be 
 grossly offensive, was ill-starred alike in his personal and 
 in his official life. Manning failed to become Pope. 
 Northcote, who seems to have done violence to his better 
 nature on tho urging of his worst followers, was soon 
 shelved under humiliating circumstances by tho chief of 
 his party, and was believed to have died broken-hearted. 
 Parnell's tragedy needs no recalling. Churchill, after a 
 notable fall from place and power, made a memorably 
 tragical finish ; and of the other members of the Fourth 
 Party, which had been so zealous to drag down the 
 heretic in the interests of party politics, all were soon 
 relegated to obscurity, with the sole oxception of tho 
 ablest, who had stood aloof from the hunt. Mr. Balfour 
 never went beyond the compliance of saying in effect 
 that Bradlaugh had antagonized respectable sentiments 
 and might expect what he got. And even that view was 
 little heard of in the latter years of Bradlaugh's life, 
 when he won his battle in the letter as in the spirit by 
 carrying his Affirmation Bill ; or at his death, when he 
 passed away in the odour of vindication, the House of 
 Commons having deleted the records of its discredited 
 resolutions while he lay unconscious forever of praise or 
 blame.
 
 VIII 
 
 CLOSING YEARS 
 
 The Titanic parliamentary struggle found Bradlaugh at 
 the beginning still a physically powerful man, capable of 
 ejecting froixi a meeting two rowdy medical students with 
 one hand and a third with the other. It left him at the 
 close prematurely aged. To compare his photographs 
 before and after is to see such a change as may be 
 wrought by a long illness. But he was committed, 
 alike by his burden of debt and his enormous appetite for 
 political work, to living the rest of his life at a strain 
 which few men bear in their prime. His journal and his 
 pamphlets could yield no large income, and he had to 
 give three lectures on most Sundays in the year to make 
 ends meet. All the while, as a private member of Parlia- 
 ment, he worked as hard as a zealous Cabinet Minister. 
 At the new start, in 1886, he had three important irons 
 in the fire : a Bill for the Compulsory Cultivation of 
 Land ; a campaign for a Labour Bureau ; and another 
 for the Abolition of Perpetual Pensions ; beside agitations 
 for the abolition of market rights and tolls, and for the 
 enforcement of the Truck Act. In the latter matter he 
 had the passing satisfaction of exposing one of his worst 
 enemies, Sir Henry Tyler, who had insulted his 
 daughters, and who, as a director of the Rhymney Iron 
 Company, was responsible for carrying on " an infamous 
 system by which poor men were defrauded of part of 
 their earnings." A Government prosecution resulted in 
 a conviction, with the fullest statutory penalty. 
 
 99
 
 100 CLOSING YEAES 
 
 On greater matters he laboured as no other member 
 did in the cause of the people of India ; and he gave 
 warm support to Gladstone's first Home Rule Bill, 
 getting tho volatile cheers of the Irish Home Rulers who 
 had tried to drive him out of Parliament. One who 
 had exulted most grossly over him on his exclusion came 
 to him with tho compliment: " You have been the best 
 Christian of us all." When some friends who had been 
 embittered by tho Irish action reproached him for his 
 attitude, he answered : " If I cannot try to do justice to 
 my political and religious enemies, I am unfit to be 
 a legislator." Ilome Rule, he remarked, " is no four- 
 leaved shamrock, but it is the beginning of justice." 
 But the new Liberal Government soon fell, with its Bill ; 
 and in the new election at Northampton he again had 
 a rabid Tory opponent, w T ho, badly beaten, dictated a 
 furious insult to the reporters at the declaration of tho 
 poll, the crowd having shouted him down. By this 
 time, however, Christian opinion had been so far educated 
 that Bishop Magee, in a review article, proposed to 
 abolish the parliamentary oath altogether ; and an 
 attempt at a new movement in the House against the 
 atheist failed completely. A Conservative member who 
 was vilely insolent on the subject at a Primrose League 
 meeting had to apologize both to Bradlaugh and to the 
 House. 
 
 The new "leader" there, Lord Randolph Churchill, 
 had richly earned, and had received, punitive treatment 
 at Bradlaugh's hands, but was now all for conciliation, 
 and secured a stet iiroccssiis in the still outstanding 
 appeal to the House of Lords on Bradlaugh's right to 
 sit, which the Gladstone Ministry had refused to let 
 drop. But that did not withhold Bradlaugh from pub- 
 lishing a scathing open letter to his lordship ; and some 
 time passed beforo his contempt for the assailant who
 
 CLOSING YEAES 101 
 
 had called his supporters the scum and dregs of the 
 population softened into compassion. In his own party 
 he still found some of the old jealousy, the official 
 Liberal Press of the time doing its best for years to 
 suppress the fact that it was he who had secured the 
 establishment of the Labour Bureau. When, under the 
 Tory Government, besides assisting vig rously in the 
 exposure of the corrupt expenditure of the Corporation 
 of London, he not only carried his own Truck Bill, but 
 secured from the Tory Government a Eoyal Commission 
 on Market Eights and Tolls, there began to pass round 
 among the Liberals who had been chagrined by his 
 victory the legend that he had developed strong Conser- 
 vative leanings. What had happened was certainly 
 remarkable. A number of the younger Conservatives 
 had been influenced by the national appreciation of 
 courage to the extent of being ashamed of the part their 
 faction had played, and, being mostly unencumbered by 
 religion, sought his goodwill to the extent of telling the 
 Government that they would support him in a division 
 if the Commission were not granted. But there was no 
 change in Bradlaugh's politics ; and his most effective 
 exposure of Churchill — already out of his leadership — 
 took place after the Commission had been granted. 
 After that he held his hand ; indeed, when Churchill 
 wrote to the Times in support of Bradlaugh's Oaths Bill 
 permitting parliamentary affirmation, it w T as impossible 
 not to recognize at least the action of repentance, what- 
 ever might have been the spirit. The appointment of 
 a Eoyal Commission on Perpetual Pensions, which 
 unanimously adopted almost the whole of Bradlaugh's 
 report, served to heighten his credit outside, while making 
 orthodox Liberals nervous about the new menace of his 
 parliamentary prominence. In House talk the parlia- 
 mentary year was chronicled as " Bradlaugh's session."
 
 102 CLOSING YEARS 
 
 In the Liberal schism over Home Rule he took his 
 stand unreservedly with Gladstone, promptly assailing 
 Mr. Chamberlain's project of a " National Party " — the 
 device which conlinuos from time to time to oxpross 
 the exigencies of personal ambition in politics. For 
 Gladstone Bradlaugh had the enthusiasm of a soldier 
 for a great leader, and he was always slow to assent to 
 any political criticism of the " Grand Old Man " — a titlo 
 which he was believed to have originated. ("Grand" 
 was a word he rather overworked on the platform.) 
 
 Alongside of successes came sorrows. Mrs. Besant 
 had taken to Socialism about 1885 ; and in 1888, after 
 she had disturbed her friends by scheming " Ironside 
 Circles " and other risky plans with W. T. Stead, came 
 her conversion to the Mahatmistic " theosophy " of 
 Madame Blavatsky. Bradlaugh and his partner would 
 in all likelihood have married in their early days of 
 association had there been a decent divorce law to set 
 her free ; and in that case many things might have gone 
 differently. What he regarded as her aberrations in 
 judgment never broke their friendship ; but, as he said, 
 he felt himself on the other side of a river from her in 
 the main matters in which they had laboured together. 
 When her Socialist friend, William Morris, got into 
 political trouble with the police, she went to Bradlaugh 
 for help, and instantly got it, though Morris had always 
 been hostile to him. Morris gave his friends a humorous 
 account of how Bradlaugh at once took charge of the 
 police proceedings as if he were at the head of things. 
 But Mrs. Bosant's later step from Socialism into 
 mysticism was for the ageing Rationalist a blow. To 
 the last, he never said an unfriendly word of his old 
 comrade, and never allowed any one else to say one in 
 his presence. 
 
 Towards the end of his life, in a debate on "Humanity's
 
 CLOSING YEARS 103 
 
 Gain from Unbelief " with a Newcastle clergyman, his 
 antagonist thought fit to taunt him with having lost " at 
 least eleven apostles of the Secularist party " in twenty 
 years. The assertion was much wide of the facts ; but 
 the retort, that the rev. gentleman's own Founder, 
 according to the records, had been deserted by his eleven 
 apostles in an instant, had the effect with the audience 
 that may be imagined. The rev. gentleman choso to 
 arguo that " unbelief " is a state of mental indecision, 
 subversive of vigorous action. The retrospect of Brad- 
 laugh's life made the quibble entertaining. 
 
 In those last years he was mainly occupied with 
 politics ; and, after incurring life-long obloquy by his 
 Radicalism, had the experience of being vilified by the 
 Socialists of the period, including Morris, as " a friend of 
 the plundering classes." British post-Ovvenite Socialism 
 has always stood out from that of other European 
 countries in being scrupulously detached in the mass 
 from intellectual interests ; and its exponents used to 
 argue that Bradlaugh had deflected democratic progress 
 by interesting working men in such questions as the 
 truth of the Bible and religion, to say nothing of the 
 population question. There were some notable excep- 
 tions, such as Mr. Belfort Bax ; but the Fabians and 
 other sections were at one in striving to keep the 
 thoughts of the workers strictly concentrated on bread 
 and butter. The attitude appears to be specially 
 English : the British Liberal press to this day cherishes 
 religious obscurantism in a fashion that makes Continental 
 Liberals stare. Bradlaugh's followers, trained to reason 
 on all issues, were apt to be as caustic critics of Socialist 
 Utopianism as they were of the current religion ; and 
 the Socialists of that day were proportionately resentful. 
 The younger ones, conscious of having reached final 
 truth in virtue of being late and not early Victorians,
 
 101 CLOSING YEARS 
 
 pronounced his politics, in their manuor, obsolete. Now 
 that Marxism has become perceptibly obsolote for their 
 more instructed successors it may be generally possible 
 to realize that ho did their cause more service than 
 they could by exposing their consummate incompetence 
 to face the practical problom. At that stage the Fabian 
 Society was feverishly resentful of the vogue won by 
 Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, That a " Boston 
 Sunday-school teachor " should presume to elaborate a 
 working scheme of Socialism when they had disdained 
 tho attempt was not to be pardoned. The declaration of 
 somo that they preferred "the London of Dickens" to 
 the Bellamy vision was really an unconscious testimony 
 to tho efficiency with which Bradlaugh had riddled their 
 own hazy proposals. 
 
 It is, however, quite a mistake to say that Bradlaugh 
 was a rigid individualist, lie once or thrice used that 
 name as against the doctrines of absolutist Socialism, 
 having innately that perception of the value of individual 
 initiative which the more thoughtful Socialists are now 
 coming to entertain. But in private, on the immediate 
 issue, he said that he was neither individualist nor 
 Socialist, llo found himself a membor of a complex 
 community, still interpenetrated with survivals of old 
 feudalism and class antagonism, and he held it the 
 business of a legislator to plan for such a society as a 
 sane physician prescribes for the special constitution of 
 the individual patient, not for a theoretic human body 
 which does not exist. And that was his lino of action. 
 His Truck Act, the Labour Bureau, the notably stringont 
 Bill for the Compulsory Cultivation of Land which he 
 was never able to carry— these were far from being 
 individualist measures. lie was in the very van of the 
 politically possible, as he had been in his youth and 
 prime, when he fought for franchise reform and com-
 
 CLOSING YEAES 105 
 
 pulsory national education — also a non-individualist 
 ideal. While the professed Socialists were volubly 
 theorizing, amateurishly at that, he was making things 
 move on. Only in respect of his republicanism did he 
 abandon as impracticable his old propaganda, though he 
 never altered the description of his journal as "^Republican, 
 Atheistic, Malthusian." 
 
 Had he lived a year or two longer, with health, the 
 respectables of the Liberal party would have been much 
 disquieted by the rapidly growing opinion that this man, 
 so singularly efficient as a legislator, should sit in the 
 next Liberal Ministry. They were spared the trial, as 
 he was spared an extension of the experience he had 
 over the Employers' Liability Bill of 1888, which he 
 defended against Trade Unionists who opposed it by 
 arguments which struck at their own Bills. Such 
 opposition he had long before predicted as not unlikely. 
 He foresaw that in detail Labour would seek its own 
 interest very much as the employers in the past had 
 sought theirs, and he cared above all things for justice. 
 Once, appointed as arbitrator in a trade dispute, he had 
 given nearly equal offence to both sides — to the employers 
 by insisting on the complete production of their books, 
 to the men by after all giving an award unexpectedly 
 favourable to the masters. Such thorns are the portion 
 of the practical politician who keeps a conscience. 
 
 Bradlaugh debated Socialism in writing, amicably but 
 firmly, with Mrs. Besant, before she gave up Socialism 
 for theosophy ; later with Mr. Belfort Bax ; and twice 
 on the platform with Mr. Hyndman ; and a study of 
 these debates will still be found educative. Always he 
 forced his antagonists to the vital issue : Is Socialism 
 Communism or is it not ? — a point on which they were 
 extremely loth to face a logical conclusion ; and again 
 and again he exposed the falsity of the Marxian formula
 
 106 CLOSING YEARS 
 
 of a progressive worsening of the lot of Labour. More 
 than any polemisfc in his time ho thoreby arrested the 
 contagion of a thoughtless Socialism in his own country. 
 Tho Socialist irritation was proportionate ; and in his 
 last debate with Mr. Hyndman in 1890 the rank-and-file 
 of the movemont illustrated their unfitness to plan a 
 just and workable social system by constant disorderly 
 interruptions. By that time his health was visibly 
 wrecked and his end was near ; but there was no modi- 
 fication of disorder on that score. 
 
 Meantime he had well wound up some of his main 
 tasks. In 1888 he had a reverse, in respect of a farcical 
 libel action brought against him by a Tory agitator named 
 Peters, in a matter that began in 1886, when Bradlaugh 
 stated in the House that Peters had been financed by 
 leading Conservatives in a " Fair Trade " demonstration. 
 A cheque of Lord Salisbury's had been in dispute, and 
 investigation was then refused ; but when the matter 
 came to the Courts in 1888 his lordship testified that he 
 had sent no cheque ; and though there was very obviously 
 no legal " libel " in the case, the judge, Baron Huddleston, 
 directed the jury that there was, with the result of a 
 verdict of £300 damages. The same judge in tho 
 following year, when Mrs. Bosant brought an action 
 against a clergyman for an extremely vile libel, actually 
 directed the jury that the only question for them was 
 whether the libeller had honestly believed his assertion 
 to be true — tho direct contrary of the direction he had 
 given in the Peters case. In that matter, Bradlaugh's 
 fellow members showed their sense of the situation by 
 subscribing to pay the damages and costs for him ; and 
 Mr. Frank Lockwood's verses, beginning " Halves, my 
 Peters!" which were not made the subject of any " libel " 
 action, remain on record to hint tho professional view of 
 the trial.
 
 CLOSING YEAES 107 
 
 In the House his status rose more and more. In 
 a debate on an amendment to the Address in 1888 
 concerning the troubles of Scotch Crofters, Mr. Balfour, 
 recommending emigration, argued that the trouble was 
 over-population, and condemned the recklessness of the 
 crofters in that matter. Bradlaugh commented keonly 
 on this official adoption of a view of population which, 
 when he had urgod it in the past, had " made him the 
 mark for some of the most wicked language that one 
 man could use against another." Mr. Balfour at once 
 rose to say, with emphasis: "Z never in my life used 
 any such language against the hon. gentleman ; never, 
 never." It was a memorable utterance. But the Tory 
 party in general had done as Bradlaugh said ; and it was 
 now left to Bradlaugh to iusist that " emigration ought 
 not to be thought of as a remedy until other means had 
 been tried ; until the unjust conditions which hampered 
 the poor, and which had been artificially created by the 
 class to which the hon. gentleman opposite belonged, 
 had been swept away." Which was certainly not 
 Conservative individualism. 
 
 In the same year he carried his Oaths Bill, which 
 made it impossible for any Freethinker in future to 
 suffer as he had suffered for honesty in avowal of 
 opinion. His great difficulty with the measure was that 
 Christian lawyers, knowing the common proclivity to 
 perjury among uneducated believers, would not consent 
 to let Freethinkers have benefit of conscience unless the 
 right to affirm were refused to Christians who had no 
 conscientious objections to an oath as such. In order 
 to save his Bill, he accepted an amendment to that 
 effect. No objection was made at the time ; but months 
 afterwards some leading Liberal members began a 
 surprising opposition. The changes were rung on the 
 effects of a declaration of "no religious belief " and the
 
 108 CLOSING YEARS 
 
 formula "inconsistent with any religious belief"; and 
 many of the leading objectors seem to have entirely 
 Eailed to grasp the issue. The demand to exclude every 
 kind of question as to the opinions of a witness or juror 
 was perfectly idle ; it could not be obtained. When 
 loading Liberals thus confused the issuo and obstructed 
 tho reform, it was inevitable that all the inert Liberals 
 (including a numbor at Northampton) who had nevor 
 movod a finger for any reform in oath usage should 
 denounce tho reformer as having surrendered his principle. 
 Obviously there was no surrender. Any Christian who 
 conscientiously objectod to oath-taking was left free to 
 object. Those who have no conscientious objection, and 
 who attach weight to tho oath, may consistently bo 
 called upon to take it, since by definition it obliges them 
 to special veracity. The only alternative is to abolish 
 the legal use of oaths altogether, and this was unattain- 
 able. Bradlaugh, by accepting the amendment, made 
 possible a relief to those who most required it. 
 
 In the end the Bill passed very smoothly through tho 
 Upper House, being managed by Earl Spencer and Lord 
 Coleridge, with the approval of the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury ; while in the House of Commons, as a result 
 of his campaign, tho Conservative Government stood 
 pledged to abolish Perpetual Pensions. As against these 
 satisfactions he had the experience of being grossly 
 libelled in a professed " Life " of him, financed by tho 
 then editor of tho Secular Review, afterwards tho 
 Agnostic Journal. Tho coadjutors in the enterprise, 
 birds of a feather, quarrelled fiercely over their money 
 matters, and two of them gave Bradlaugh evidence 
 against the editor, who at length begged for mercy, pro- 
 fessed to havo no copies of the book in his possession, 
 and finally, at Bradlaugh's death, publishod a remorseful 
 article in his praise. It was not tho only instance in
 
 CLOSING YEAES 109 
 
 Bradlaugh's experience of a black sheep on his own sido 
 of the fence. On the other hand, industrial distress in 
 mining and other centres having greatly reduced the sale 
 of his journal, thus aggravating the burden of the debts 
 run up in his legal struggles, he was generously relieved 
 by a public subscription, started by W. T. Stead, most 
 chivalrous of journalists. A number of Churchmen and 
 Conservatives gave, some of them largely ; and though he 
 begged to have the subscription closed on his birthday, 
 thus limiting the amount, he was enabled to pay off all 
 his law debts and some of the others. But over this 
 comfort soon fell the shadow of a new sorrow. On 
 December 2 his daughter Alice died, aged thirty-two, 
 making a woeful blank in his little household. Her 
 place there was taken by his married daughter, Mrs. 
 Bonner ; and to the end he lived in the simple lodging, 
 over a shop in St. John's Wood, which had been his 
 home for fourteen years. 
 
 One of the many proofs of changed feeling towards 
 him came from the National Liberal Club. In 1884 he 
 had been invited to become a member, and on his making 
 application a faction in the Club contrived to put upon 
 him the insult of refusing to elect him. Now, in 1889, 
 he was elected without his knowledge, a member paying 
 his first year's subscription. But he was not to profit 
 long by the late sunshine. In October, after a parlia- 
 mentary session in which he toiled as hard as ever, came 
 a dangerous and prostrating illness, the beginning of 
 " Bright's disease." Eest and recreation, the doctors 
 held, might have averted it ; but a long rest he never 
 could afford. So much had common feeling changed 
 that prayers were now offered up for his recovery in 
 many churches, the British Weekly demurring. And 
 one Halifax clergyman, the Kev. Mr. Millson, gave a 
 lecture to raise financial help, realizing £10.
 
 110 CLOSING YEARS 
 
 IIo recovered so far as to be fit to go on a voyage of 
 recuperation to India, where he was able to deliver an 
 address, marked by ripe political wisdom, to the Indian 
 Congress, which received him with a memorable demon- 
 stration of enthusiastic gratitude. Throughout his whole 
 parliamentary time, and in his journal, ho had been the 
 devoted advocate of Indian interests, noods, and claims, 
 thus earning the title of " member for India," which had 
 bofore been given to Fawcett. If appreciation could 
 have given him back strength, he would have been 
 restored to full vigour. But in his way of life, always 
 toiling at desk, on tho platform, and in Parliament, 
 restoration was unattainable. In 1890 he resigned his 
 Presidentship of the National Secular Society, his 
 successor being G. W. Foote, the able and eloquent 
 editor of the Freethinker. " The battle of Freethought 
 in this country," Bradlaugh told his followers in his 
 closing speech, " is not over." His calculation was that 
 it would ultimately lie between Freethought and Rome. 
 But his own battles were now nearly done. 
 
 In 1890 died his old friend and right-hand helpor, 
 Thomas Adams, ex-Mayor of Northampton. Such 
 bereavements, and his own near vision of death, left his 
 beliefs wdiolly unimpaired ; and his calm criticism of 
 Gladstone's Impregnable Bock of Holy Scripture was as 
 trenchant in its quiet way as anything of his earlier 
 days. In the House, fighting the general battle of India, 
 he defended the Maharajah of Kashmir, then arbitrarily 
 deposed, and was duly accused of kowtowing to royalty. 
 Within three years tho Maharajah was restored. For the 
 Indian people Bradlaugh worked to the ond. Two resorts 
 to his favourite recreation, fishing on Loch Long, kopt him 
 going through the year, lecturing for his income as of old, 
 when he w T ould fain have rested from such labours. The 
 sbop of the Freethought Publishing Company in Fleet
 
 CLOSING YEAES 111 
 
 Street was closed, for financial reasons; and in December, 
 1890, the partnership between him and Mrs. Besant was 
 dissolved. 
 
 Still ho held on. In the new session of 1891 be niado 
 a push to achieve tbo consummation of his parliamentary 
 battle, the formal expunging from the journals of the 
 House of Commons of the old resolutions excluding him, 
 after the precedent of the case of Wilkes. But one day 
 he came home very ill, though not till a terrible heart- 
 spasm followed three days later would he take to bed ; 
 and now, the fatal disease being plainly in the ascendant 
 again, the crowning victory seemed impossible. Yet it 
 was achieved. Dr. W. A. Hunter, M.P., on being 
 appealed to, readily consented to take the matter in 
 charge ; and when the news of this was brought to the 
 patient he hailed it with high content. " The very man 
 I would have had do it," ho exclaimed, and turned 
 himself to rest. Hunter succeeded to admiration 
 (January 27). Sir Edward Clarke, indeed, protested 
 that the deletion of the resolutions would be ' a mark 
 of ignominy " — which it was, for the wrong-doers of the 
 last decade. But Mr. W. H. Smith, as leader of the 
 House, was friendly. A very orthodox man, he privately 
 avowed a high respect for Bradlaugh's honesty — a feeling 
 which was heartily reciprocated. He now gave his 
 assent to the motion for the expunging of the resolutions ; 
 and, despite some furthor outcry by individual Conser- 
 vatives, it was finally carried without dissent, amid 
 cheers. The dying man, now unconscious, never knew. 
 For his friends it was the supreme pang and the one 
 comfort that, " ever a fighter," he should have been thus 
 strangely victorious in death. That came on the morn- 
 ing of January 30, 1891. He was only fifty-seven years 
 and four months old. 
 
 As before, there had been prayers for his recovery in
 
 112 CLOSING YEARS 
 
 many churches, and the usual legends of recantation 
 were current ; in view of which his daughter took the 
 precaution of procuring the signed testimony of all who 
 attended him in his illness that throughout he had never 
 uttered one word either directly or indirectly hearing on 
 religion or any religious suhject. In November he had 
 published one of his last non-political lectures, My Heresy 
 Noiv and Thirty Years Ago, and in December he had 
 lectured on "Life, Death, and Immortality" without 
 a wavering word. He was not of the wavering sort. 
 
 By his own wish his funeral was without any form 
 of "service." His daughter Alice, an earnest science- 
 teacher, had desired to be cremated ; but chance had 
 prevented. As he had never concerned himself about the 
 disposal of his remains, his surviving daughter chose to 
 let it bo "earth to earth," in the old fashion. To his 
 funeral, at Brook wood Cemetery, came by train thousands 
 of men and women of all classes, from all parts of 
 England, Mr. John Morley being the most distinguished 
 in the crowd. The dead man had always disliked 
 mourning garments and badges, and those who knew 
 this conformed to his tastes. In sad silence, with 
 uncovered heads, they all stood while the coffin was 
 lowered ; and as they filed past the grave hundreds 
 threw into it their little tri-coloured rosettes of the 
 ' Northampton colours." An hour after, when friends 
 went back for a last look, they found that a band of 
 sorrowful men had taken the shovels from the grave- 
 diggers and were one by one slowly casting into the 
 grave their last tribute, covering up, 
 
 With only perhaps some tear, 
 Each for his brother the hushed 
 Heart and the limitless dreams 
 With a little gift of sand.
 
 AGED 57 
 
 Facing p. 112
 
 IX 
 
 INFLUENCE AND PERSONALITY 
 
 FOR the majority of conventional English people in his 
 day, it will already have been gathered by the unbiased 
 reader, Bradlaugh was a kind of ogre. He was detested 
 not merely because of his anti-religious doctrines, 
 though, as we have seen, there was much malignity on 
 that head, but because he was a very formidable force 
 in popular politics, making very many Radicals, and a 
 good many republicans, as well as many freethinkers. 
 As compared with leaders like Gladstone and Bright, he 
 had but a small middle-class following; but among the 
 working mass he evoked a devotion of the intensest kind. 
 No one so visibly hypnotized and swayed a great 
 meeting as he. The orator's voice, pleasant in ordinary 
 conversation, was rather trumpet-like than musical when 
 raised to its immense power ; at times it was distinctly 
 metallic; and, technically speaking, he did not use it 
 well. But as a platform instrument it was of marvellous 
 potency. In the period when he went round the country 
 addressing meetings and challenging by formal resolu- 
 tion support for his claim to take his seat, there could 
 constantly be witnessed the curious spectacle of the 
 slowly and reluctantly raised hands of many respectable 
 citizens who gave him no goodwill, but who for the life 
 of them could not refuse their vote to that overwhelming 
 advocacy. 
 
 It can thus be understood how, from his early youth 
 to his death, he had throughout England many 
 thousands of devoted adherents, men and women who
 
 114 INFLUENCE AND PERSONALITY 
 
 grow old with him, but for many of whom ho was always 
 "the hoy" who had brought into their lives the light of 
 a reasoned conviction on tho problems of life and death. 
 In all of tho many struggles in which he had to face tho 
 risk of financial ruin, their pence came to his aid. Onco 
 I found him crying over tho news that a poor old couple 
 in Northampton, after having thus helped through their 
 nobly humble lives, had decided to do without their 
 bi-weekly glass of supper beer in order to send the price 
 to help him. Over that he had " broken down." 
 
 On his side he gave something that was also precious — 
 the spirit which he imbibed or reinforced from Emerson 
 in his boyhood. I knew personally two men whose lives 
 he transfigured in tho fashion in which "conversion" is 
 said at times to operate, turning them from topers into 
 model citizens. Of neither case had Bradlaugh personal 
 knowledge. The intellectual influence was proportionate 
 to, and bound up with, the emotional. In 1873 Sir 
 Charles Dilke was quoted by Wendell Phillips at Boston, 
 on tho authority of Mr. Jenkins, author of Ginx's Bab]/, 
 as having said of Bradlaugh that he " does the thinking 
 for more minds, has more influence, than any other man 
 in England." This may have been an over-statement ; 
 but Dilke was even in his youth a keen and shrewd 
 observer. Later lie seems to have changed his tone. 
 His biographers toll that Sir Charles never took part in 
 any debate on the Bradlaugh struggle : " He supported 
 Mr. Gladstone's views in favour of allowing affirmation ; 
 but he did so without heartiness, disliking ' tho trade of 
 living on blatant atheism,' and finding in himself 
 tendencies which led him to fear that he was clerically 
 minded. Ho had always an extreme dislike of talk or 
 writing that offended legitimate susceptibilities." 1 
 
 1 Life of Sir C. W. Dilke, by Stephen Gwynn, M.P., and Miss 
 G. M. Tuckwell (1917), i, 316.
 
 INFLUENCE AND PERSONALITY 115 
 
 It must bo some obscure malarly of tbe speech - 
 controlling nerve centres that still causes many educated 
 and intelligent people, when they have to say " atheist," 
 mochanically to prefix " blatant." Tbe words seem for 
 minds so affected to go bracketed, like "implicit faith," 
 "crass materialism," and "God damn." If the term 
 " blatant " was actually used by Dilke, and if it was 
 meant to apply to Bradlaugh's appeal to be allowed to 
 take his seat on affirmation, it was part of the wilfully 
 false legend that he obtruded his atheism on the House. 
 If Dilke used it in his religious mood to describe 
 Bradlaugh's advocacy of his beliefs, the answer is that 
 Sir Charles, the best-informed man of his generation on 
 all matters of practical politics, had no competence in 
 philosophy or in any question of religion. The phrase 
 about the trade of living by blatant atheism is for Dilke 
 surprisingly fatuous. The charge of making money by 
 that means had been absurdly cast at Bradlaugh in his 
 youth, when a lecturing journey often yielded him but a 
 few coppers over his railway fare and his scanty rations 
 Dilke must have known better. Bradlaugh, even before 
 the oath struggle, while never minimizing his opinions, 
 lectured far more often upon political than upon 
 religious questions, and could at any time have decupled 
 his income by renouncing atheism, or even by simply 
 concealing it. Tbe fling of the man of inherited fortune 
 savours of the insolence which, in discussions on the 
 payment of members of Parliament, always appears to 
 take for granted that inherited wealth is a positive merit. 
 
 If Dilke had in him clerical tendencies, they never 
 moved him to disparage his admired friend Gambetta, 
 who was also the friend of Bradlaugh, and to whom 
 Bradlaugh expressly appealed to modify the retaliatory 
 anti- clericalism of his party in France. If " clerically 
 minded " meant in Dilke's case religiously minded, his
 
 11G INFLUENCE AND PEKSONALITY 
 
 proclivities in that kind brought him small solace. His 
 own experience of " legitimate susceptibilities " had not 
 been fortunate. A comparison of the two men in point 
 of moral rectitude would not be to Dilke's advantage. 
 Some of us who greatly admired his accomplishments, 
 and sympathized over tho tragedy of his career, had 
 cause, lator, to note another aspect of his personality. 
 
 In private life Bradlaugh was no more given than his 
 best-bred neighbours to obtruding his opinions. His 
 range of table discourse was wide, and it ran little to 
 controversy. The English legend of his offensiveness 
 found no public acceptance in America, where ho had a 
 friendly reception from peoplo of all classes, including 
 Emerson ; or in France, whore he met with equal 
 friendliness. When Garibaldi, the freethinker, visited 
 England in 18G4, a " great lady " thought herself bound 
 to thrust upon him her " regret that Eenan was so much 
 read in Italy " ; and Gladstone, who professed to admire 
 him, noted in his diary that " the utmost I could get from 
 him was that it would be sad if the Italian people should 
 lose its faith." The " obtrusions " in this case came 
 from the orthodox side ; and Garibaldi speedily departed, 
 with a " painful impression that the English Government 
 consider the prolongation of his stay in England very 
 embarrassing, and are very anxious that he should go." 
 Bradlaugh, in his way, had bettor fortune abroad; though 
 he would perhaps have been less easy to dismiss. In 
 England, at that period, tolerance seems to have been 
 held to be incumbent only on heretics. 
 
 Some of the characteristics which in Bradlaugh evoked 
 criticism, on the other hand, were developed in him by 
 his life of battle. Heading a militant propaganda that 
 was always under severe bombardment, constantly 
 organizing public meetings in the teeth of hostility that 
 tended to bo violent, ho acquire! a somewhat military
 
 INFLUENCE AND PERSONALITY 117 
 
 manner in affairs. A life of constant and intense struggle 
 cannot be lived without a force for self-assertion. But if 
 Bradlaugh had minor deportmental faults, he was sound 
 in all the manly virtues. Essentially brave, he was 
 never cruel; being indeed a very genial soul, com- 
 passionate with all weakness as such, and contemptuous 
 only towards baseness. 
 
 Mr. H. L. Stephen, Judge of the High Court of 
 Calcutta, in an introduction (exemplary for bad writing) 
 to a reprint of Cobbett's English Grammar (1906), has 
 thought fit to state that Bradlaugh, " in fact, learnt in 
 the House of Commons those good manners which men 
 more happily situated may learn in boyhood. Cobbett 
 never learnt them at all." We have seen something of 
 what were the manners of the House thus courageously 
 certificated ; and, leaving the Judge's manners to his own 
 warranty, we may estimate his judicial force from the 
 further sentence : — 
 
 The value of posthumous fame may be judged of by 
 the fact that, whereas Mr. Bradlaugh's name will 
 probably be forgotten in a generation, Cobbett is still 
 a more or less popular author, and some of his 
 works will assuredly deserve the serious attention of 
 his fellow countrymen a century after his death. 
 
 They certainly will, while Judges can pen sentences like 
 that. But it is not given to such judges, and such 
 writers, to settle the duration of the memory of any man, 
 and Bradlaugh's may haply subsist as long as Cobbett's. 
 His manners were good enough to save him from 
 boasting of them. 
 
 As a debater, he was scrupulously courteous ; and he 
 debated very many times, chiefly on religious matters. 
 Sometimes he found equally courteous opponents, whose 
 merits as such he warmly acknowledged ; of one or two 
 he became a personal friend ; and no one in the series
 
 118 INFLUENCE AND PERSONALITY 
 
 is known to have complained of discourtesy from him ; 
 though in his youth ho had once or twice occasion to 
 complain of great polemic offensiveness in a ribald 
 champion of religion. Of differences of opinion among 
 his associates ho was tolerant in the very highest degree : 
 as an editor, ho had no equal in that regard among my 
 acquaintance. Until his domestic affliction forced him 
 to he otherwise, he was a man of large and various 
 hospitality, and of many friends. Of these was the 
 subsequently famous James Thomson, whose City of 
 Dreadful Night was published in Bradlaugh's National 
 Reformer. Some wiseacres, instead of recognizing that 
 the publication was as journalism quixotic, have con- 
 demned the editor for not somehow contriving to make 
 Thomson's life one of financial ease. In point of fact, he 
 housed him for long periods, treating him as a brother, 
 finding for him post after post, which Thomson always 
 lost, for the one sad reason. 
 
 There has arisen in some literary quarters, I gather, 
 the belief that Thomson's incurable dipsomania revolted 
 the " Puritanic " side of Bradlaugh, who is supposed to 
 have turned the hapless poet adrift. This is an absolute 
 delusion. Thomson was forgiven times without number. 
 When he had gone on one of his drinking bouts, the good 
 woman servant who was one of the blessings of the 
 Bradlaugh family used to seek for him in his haunts, 
 retrieve him, and bring him homo, where he never heard 
 an unkind word, being loved with the affection he 
 himself long gave. But literary people have to realize 
 that dipsomania breaks down character as well as 
 physique, and makes changelings. Thomson, made 
 morbid by his own sense of weakness and failure, and 
 seeking solace against his sense of humiliation, came 
 under the influence of certain persons who flattered him, 
 persuaded him that ho had been exploited and ill-used,
 
 INFLUENCE AND PERSONALITY 119 
 
 and turned him against his friend. It was after a 
 gratuitously insulting public display of hostility by 
 Thomson, possible to him only in a state of demoraliza- 
 tion, that Bradlaugh, stung to anger with him for the 
 first time, made a fierce retort — the last word that 
 passed between them, though the pervorted poet uttered 
 many more malignant aspersions. It was the climax of 
 Thomson's spiritual tragedy. The pretence that he had 
 in any way furthered Bradlaugh's fortunes by his 
 scattered journalistic contributions, for which he was 
 more liberally paid than the results could ever warrant, 
 can be honestly made only by men who know nothing of 
 practical journalism. 
 
 In his later years the broken poet turned away from 
 his misleaders. A man for whom Bradlaugh had neither 
 respect nor liking, and who had abundantly forfeited his 
 confidence, came to him one day with a bundle of letters 
 of Thomson's in which, he stated, the poet scathingly 
 commented on the treatment he had received from his 
 chief associate in hostility. Bradlaugh, who knew too 
 well the likelihood of the statement, contemptuously 
 refused to go into the matter at all. In his family, 
 where the poet had been the dearest friend of the 
 children, he rarely spoke of him again, and never without 
 tenderness for " poor Thomson." The girls heard of the 
 quarrel only from outsiders. 
 
 To Bradlaugh, personal vindictiveness was quite alien. 
 Any detestations he ever entertained for long were im- 
 personal ; and not only did he never feel it necessary to 
 express " horror," in the orthodox manner, at the 
 religious opinions which he held to be false, he never 
 brooded on the many foul aspersions cast at him 
 publicly, after he had once branded them, and never 
 exulted over the reverses of his enemies. Of rabid old 
 Newdegate, who had finally to sell his Limber to pay his
 
 120 INFLUENCE AND PERSONALITY 
 
 law costs, the proposed victim of the suit spoke with 
 commiseration. It is doubtless a common experience 
 that the wronged man, if he keeps his sanity, hates less 
 than do the wrongers. But there are contrary examples ; 
 and Bradlaugh privately avowed that, having seen men 
 with grievances lose their balance, ho took pains to keep 
 his. One of his disciplines during his Parliamentary 
 struggle was to work over the earlier part of his textual 
 scrutiny of the Old Testament, an entirely unemotional 
 task, which resulted in a special volume on Genesis, 
 singularly disappointing to any religious reader who 
 might seek in it for violent language. But as every one 
 knows who heard many of his lectures, violence had no 
 part in his polemic ; and his satire was but intermittent. 
 After a keen survey of the ethical purport of tho 
 Pontatouch he would close with tho simple challenge : 
 " This is the narrative of the Bihle : is it true ? " 
 
 Mr. G. K. Chesterton, whose present Church has the 
 worst record for iniquity and calumny in the Parlia- 
 mentary struggle, and who makes no claim to have 
 heard the victim lecture, once spoke at a Church 
 Congress of "the exploded trumpery and nonsense which 
 Bradlaugh and others used to talk," and its " coarse 
 blasphemy." Mr. Chesterton, like Manning, relies on 
 the method of bluster, and, like him, resorts spon- 
 taneously to coarseness in order to impute it. But Mr. 
 Chesterton is not singular in the resort to facile 
 aspersion of the dead. Mr. Herbert Paul, in his 
 History of Modem England, makes a general attack on 
 '' the National Reformer, in which the coarse materialism 
 of Charles Bradlaugh found irreverent expression." 
 Mr. Paul is the historian who once described Toland, 
 Asgill, Collins, and Coivard as " deists " of Swift's time, 
 who fretted that "clear, strong mind" by exhibiting 
 "the pretentious cleverness of men who acquired a
 
 INFLUENCE AND PERSONALITY 121 
 
 spurious reputation for wit and learning by their attacks 
 upon established beliefs." The comprehensive ignorance 
 here displayed concerning Asgill and Coward — both of 
 whom Mr. Paul aspersed as bad writers on the strength 
 of Swift's " profound and just contempt " — is matched 
 in the account of the National Reformer, from which 
 Mr. Paul did not think fit to cite one passage. One of 
 its ablest contributors, who wrote in it regularly for the 
 best part of a lifetime, was an opponent of every 
 semblance of professed " materialism " ; and Bradlaugh's 
 philosophy was no more coarsely materialist than 
 Spinoza's. But these matters are commonly disposed of 
 in Mr. Paul's fashion by men who, like him, are unable 
 to tell what materialism means. The charge is as 
 accurate as Mr. Frederick Greenwood's allegation in his 
 journal, that Bradlaugh preached "Free Love" — a 
 mendacious libel, for which the victim had no chance of 
 redress in fhe law courts, and by which the libeller 
 ostensibly lost no credit among his contemporaries. 
 
 The sum of the matter is that the man thus constantly 
 and malignantly vilified was remarkably free from 
 malignity. Mr. Winston Churchill, in his brilliant life 
 of his father, making no apology for Lord Randolph's 
 action and language on the oath question, expresses 
 satisfaction over a testimony to the effect that Bradlaugh 
 had declared himself as compelled to forgive his lordship 
 for past offences, on the score of his good work for 
 economy in national expenditure. Bradlaugh's privately 
 avowed reason for forgiving his enemy was that he had 
 been told of a really generous action done by him. But 
 before that he had avowed a sense of pity for the over- 
 weighted politician, nervously struggling to be dignified 
 in the position of leader of the House, for which he had 
 inadequate qualification. When England later read or 
 heard the reports of the ghastly Parliamentary scene in
 
 122 INFLUENCE AND PERSONALITY 
 
 which Lord Randolph's final physical and mental break- 
 down was revealed, some, remembering how lie had 
 helped to lead the foul hunt in 1880, looked on that 
 account with a fainter compassion on tho falling 
 castaway. But Bradlaugh, had he lived, would not have 
 heon one of theso. 
 
 To his fellow-frcothinkers his constant teaching w.is 
 an admonition to patient study of all the questions they 
 discussed. Mrs. Besant has told how he thus counselled 
 her. Lastly, he nover indulged in inflated forecasts. 
 " No man ever saw a religion die " was his comment 
 on the over-confident utterances of some of his party. 
 If since his day the creed which he impugned has under- 
 gone somewhat rapid transformation, it is in part duo 
 to the strictly veridical spirit in which he assailed it. 
 
 For the rest, he forcod on the organized Christianity of 
 his time and country a chastening experience of shame 
 by his long struggle and his final victory. In the words 
 of Mr. Birrell : " Rowdy noblemen, intemperate country 
 gentlemen, sterile lawyers, cynical but wealthy sceptics 
 who maintain religion as another fence round their 
 property, hereditary Nonconformists whose God is 
 respectability and whose goal a baronetcy, contrivod, 
 with a score or two of bigots thrown in, to make a 
 carnival of folly, a veritable devil's dance of blasphemy. 
 The debates on Bradlaugh's oath-taking extended over 
 four [read six] years, and will make melancholy reading 
 for posterity." They were so for many when they took 
 place. If England thereafter grew intellectually more 
 honest and morally more civilized, she owes the better- 
 ment in large measure to the strong soul who compelled 
 her to respect her own laws. 
 
 TEINXED BY WATTS AND CO., JOHNSON'.S COUBT, FLEET ST., LONDON, E.C.i.
 
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