Against the popular thesis that "Christianity" has achieved these

things, he brought to bear in debate and journalism not only his

knowledge of Christian and Church history in general, but his constant

experience of the influence of orthodoxy in checking betterment in

England. The State Church has been an invaluable object-lesson for

Freethinkers. As regards the claim for Christian Nonconformity, the

answer might run: If a mainly ecclesiastical or sectarian Dissent

has had so much good political result, what political, social, and

intellectual results might not come of a thoroughgoing rationalist

Dissent? It would take too long to set forth even the gist of

Bradlaugh's polemic against the Christian claim that the Christian

creed has been a force for progress; but those who care to know his

method and his case may find it tersely set forth in the latter

sections of his "Notes on Christian Evidences" in criticism of "The

Oxford House Papers," his pamphlet on "Humanity's Gain from Unbelief,"

and his debate with the Rev. Marsden Gibson on that thesis. These are

late statements of the case he put forward during the whole of his

public life; and it was on the strength of such arguments, and of his

theoretic Atheism, that he was able to create in England an energetic

and intelligent party, the active adherents of which were and are

mostly working-men.

"Secularism" is the not inappropriate name, for general purposes,

of the general doctrine of Bradlaugh and his adherents. That name,

however, is attended by the drawback that the man who first employed

it, Mr George Jacob Holyoake, is wont so to define it as to deprive

it of specific meaning for the propagandists of Freethought, while

showing no reason why it should be adopted by anybody else. Mr

Holyoake--himself an Atheist--argues, in effect, that Secularism

properly consists in simply attending to secular things; and that it

is not committed to any hostile attitude towards theology. On that

view, every political club is a secular organisation and an exponent

of Secular_ism_. Bradlaugh always argued, and nearly all Secularists

have always held with him, that this use of the term reduces it to

nullity, since it makes every Christian a Secularist in so far as

he attends to secular affairs on "business principles." There is,

of course, an important truth implied in this way of speaking; but

it is a truth irrelevant to the issue. If we are merely to discuss

secular things, there is no need for any "Secular_ist_" organisation.

Secularists commonly act freely--or as freely as they are allowed

to--with their religious neighbours in political and other public

matters. But if a distinct doctrine of the uselessness of "sacred"

machinery and theory is to be maintained; if it is to be shown that

secular action is properly co-extensive with human affairs, then these

views must be upheld by showing that all theology is delusive. A man

who believes in the existence of a personal and governing God, broadly

speaking, cannot be induced to keep theological procedure out of his

life. There may be many Indifferentists who act as Secularists without

caring at all to discuss the religious question; and there may even

be a few of the "Lucretian Theists" assumed by Mr Holyoake; but none

of the Indifferentists and not many of the Lucretian Theists will be

induced to join in a Secularist propaganda, even on Mr Holyoake's

lines. Bradlaugh fully recognised that the formulated principles

of Secularism do not directly commit the subscriber to Atheism. "I

think," he avowed, "that the consequence of Secularism is Atheism, and

I have always said so"; but he added that "clearly all Secularists

are not Atheists."[95] The tendency has inevitably been, however,

to identify Secularism with Atheism. And as Mr Holyoake has himself

all along lectured on anti-theological lines, his definition has

commonly seemed to Secularists to be wholly in the air, though his

personal merits and practical services to Freethought are felt to

outweigh minor infirmities of reasoning and judgment. Whether the

name, thus capriciously defined by its framer, will continue to be

employed by those who repudiate that definition, remains to be seen.

It is not unlikely that new Freethought organisations, finding the

word "Secularism" defined in cyclopædias on the authority and in the

language of Mr Holyoake, will seek some other label. But the label in

itself was a good one; and the propaganda of Bradlaugh recommended it

to many thousands of his countrymen.

[Footnote 95: Debate with Dr M'Cann, p. 17.]

That his open adherents were chiefly working-men, was a result of

the economic situation, which determines so many of the phases of

culture-history. It is notorious that among the upper and middle

classes there is a great amount of disbelief in the current religion;

but among the upper and middle classes there is almost no organised

effort to discredit the creed of the Churches. The small societies

which muster under the banner of "Ethical Culture," little as they are

given to speaking out on matters of creed, receive little support.

It is often said, with idle malice, that Bradlaugh's adherents were

mostly working-men because he was not qualified to appeal to educated

people; but even if that were true, it would not explain how it

comes about that other and better-educated rationalists have not

set up an organisation of middle-class and upper-class people. The

explanation is mainly economic. As a matter of fact, Bradlaugh had

hundreds of "educated" admirers among the middle and even some among

the upper classes; and in France and elsewhere he was popular among

the "classes," as at home among the masses. But the open avowal of

"unbelief" in Great Britain has always meant, and will long mean, for

one thing, a certainty of pecuniary loss, and a certain measure of

ostracism to professional men and men of business. Let a merchant,

or doctor, or shopkeeper, declare himself an active Atheist, and he

will find it appreciably harder to get customers or clients. A man of

established position and personal popularity may fairly hold his own

while avowing scepticism in general intercourse; but even he will incur

calumny and loss if he takes trouble to spread his opinions. Men in

a small way of business are almost sure to suffer heavily; and it is

still no uncommon thing for clerks and others to lose their situations

on the simple ground of so-called "infidelity." In the more bigoted

districts the risk is overwhelming. A shopkeeper in Belfast told the

present writer that when he joined the Secularists there, his business,

formerly brisk, fell off so rapidly and so ruinously that in a short

time he had to give it up. Nothing, apparently, can make the majority

of Christians, who claim that theirs is a "religion of love," realise

that to seek to injure an Atheist for his opinions is an unworthy

course. Mere Nonconformity has incurred, and still incurs, a certain

measure of penalty. But Nonconformists seem none the less ready to

inflict it in turn on others. Obviously, the number of middle-class

people who can defy these risks is small. It is only among workmen,

employed in large numbers by capitalists who do not take the trouble to

inquire about their opinions, that the avowal of Secularism is safe.

Even workmen, of course, are sometimes made to suffer in pocket, and

often from slander in their own class; but they suffer less than the

trading and professional classes. Hence it is that straightforwardness

and sincerity abound more among them. It is not that "the poor" have

from birth any occult virtues denied to the rich, but that the economic

conditions make for sincerity and openness among wage-earners more than

among earners of fees and profits. It is difficult to guess what John

Mill meant when he said that the workers in this country, though they

esteemed truthfulness, are not as a body truthful. If he meant that

they are capable of garbling facts in their own interest in matters of

industry, he was only charging them with what may be charged equally

against shopkeepers, stockbrokers, commission agents, traders, doctors,

lawyers, politicians, and clergymen. It belongs to the nature of the

case that in the important matter of loyalty to conviction, the workers

are by reason of circumstances superior to the other classes. The upper

classes, though, like each of the others, they include candid and

sincere men and women, are as much coerced by social as are the middle

classes by commercial considerations. The fear of being charged with

"bad form," and of being cold-shouldered, does among the rich what fear

of money loss and calumny does elsewhere. Idle men and women, whose

main occupation is an artificial social intercourse, are little likely

to battle for heretical opinions, even if they have been thoughtful

enough to form any. Dissimulation and conformity are too much in the

way of their daily life.

The business of systematic Freethought propaganda has thus been mainly

left to the class with least leisure and least money; and the newspaper

press naturally reflects the balance of property and status. Newspapers

are produced in the way of business, and only "paying" doctrine is put

forward by them. It is notorious that the majority of journalists are

unbelievers; but capital buys pens as it buys hands and goods; and many

pressmen have disparaged Bradlaugh's opinions as "peculiar," or worse,

who themselves held these opinions, and privately regarded the current

orthodoxy as folly. Secularism in general has thus been boycotted, and

a common repute of vulgarity and illiteracy has been cast upon it,

often by people who ostentatiously applaud the Salvation Army, with its

incredible buffooneries and its reliance on the most abject ignorance.

Bradlaugh's artisan followers, as a matter of fact, have for the most

part been the pick of their class for intelligence and energy. That

their culture was not equal to their zeal and their sincerity was no

reproach to them. They did their honest best; and from Bradlaugh they

always had his. Himself a careful student of all the questions involved

in the general issue between rationalism and orthodoxy, he constantly

urged on his followers the necessity of keeping their minds open and

their judgment active. Mrs Besant has told in her "Autobiography"

how earnestly he impressed on her the need of the most thoroughgoing

and ever-renewed preparation for the great work of instructing the

people. But inasmuch as the people in the mass can only begin with the

main or fundamental questions of religion--those of "revelation" and

"inspiration," "God," "Providence," "prayer," "miracles," "morality,"

"atonement," and "immortality"--his platform work as a Freethinker

dealt mainly with these topics. And inasmuch as the mass of the people

are at once more sincere and more logical in their relation of opinion

to conduct than most of the specialists who occupy themselves with

the literary analysis of the Old and New Testaments, Bradlaugh's work

struck at the roots of orthodoxy wherever he went. He argued that if

the Old Testament be demonstrably false in its history and barbarous

in its morals, the idea of "inspiration" in the theological sense

disappears, and the Hebrew books become mere ancient literature, forged

or otherwise, and wholly disentitled to be made a textbook for mankind.

Though a good Hebrew scholar, he did not profess to rest his case on

the textual analysis of the "higher criticism." For him the "sacred

book" was discredited as such by its own contents, however composed;

and he made it his business to attack them as an imposition on human

ignorance and credulity. His standpoint was thus put by himself:--

"There is no great honour or pleasure, although there is much

wearisome toil, in gathering the materials for proving that Genesis

nearly always blunders in its attempts at statements of fact; that

it is repeatedly chronologically incorrect, and in the chronologies

of its principal versions utterly irreconcilable; that copyists,

through ignorance, carelessness, or design, have in many places

incorrectly transcribed the text; that the translators, according to

their respective creeds, vary in their interpretations of different

momentous passages; that the Hebrew language itself has been altered

by the addition of vowel points, by means of which a sense is often

given entirely different from the original intention; and that the

majority of the ancient versions contain different and contradictory

readings of various important verses. But it is absolutely necessary

to do all this in a form accessible to the general reader so long as

the Church persists, under statutory sanction and indorsement, in its

teaching to the people from their early childhood, that this Bible

is God's Word, free from blemish. Genesis is forced upon the child's

brain as God's Word by nurse and pedagogue, and the mode of thinking

of the scholar is in consequence utterly warped in favour of the

divinity of the book before his reason has opportunity to mature for

its examination. If the book only had claimed for it that which may

be claimed for all books--namely, in part or whole to represent the

genius, education, and manners of the people and the times from whom

and which it issued, then it might fairly be objected by supporters

of the Bible that the tone of criticism here adopted is not of the

highest order, and that the petty cavillings about misplaced names,

misspelled words, incorrect dates and numbers, and geographical

errors, etc., are hardly worthy the attention of a serious student.

But as the Bible is declared to be the revelation and representative

of perfect intelligence to the whole human family; as it is placed by

the whole of its preachers immeasurably above all other books, with a

claim to dominate, and if necessary to overturn, the teachings of all

other books; as it is alleged that the Bible is free from the errors

of thought and fact more or less found in every other book; and as

it is by Act of Parliament declared to be a criminal offence in this

country for any person to deny this book to be God's Holy Word, it is

not only a right, but it becomes an unavoidable duty on the part of a

Freethinking critic to present as plainly as possible to the notice of

the people every weakness of the text, however trivial, that may serve

to show that the Bible, or any portion of it, is fallible, that it is

imperfect, that so far from being above all books, it is often below

them as a mere literary production."[96]

[Footnote 96: Preface to "The Bible: What it is," 1865.]

To such a declaration as this all protests against "Bible-smashing"

are irrelevant, by whomsoever made. Made by literary humanists, they

ignore the practical situation. It is one thing to recognise that

the Bible is a profoundly interesting body of ancient literature,

illustrating for all time the manner of growth of a cult; it is another

thing to deal with the pretensions of that cult to retain to-day the

status secured for it by all manner of sinister means in bygone ages.

Coming from clergymen, the protest is worse than irrelevant. The most

advanced of them are still, from the rationalist point of view, in the

position of using the Bible as a fetish; and men who as public teachers

regularly resort to a primitive priestly literature for sanctions and

cues to current conduct have no right whatever to protest against

those who show the people what the sacrosanct literature really is.

Bible-smashing is the necessary checkmate to Bible-worship. When the

literary humanists get the clergy to stop cultivating and trading on

Bibliolatry, it will be time for them to object to the exposure of the

Bible. But by that time there will be no occasion for the objection.

Bradlaugh did not go about lecturing against witch-burning or the

Koran. He attacked an aggressive and endowed superstition; and to

asperse him as being himself aggressive is about as idle as to charge

Mr Gladstone with aggressiveness against Beaconsfield's foreign policy,

or to denounce Home Rulers for being aggressive against the Union.

It speaks volumes for the state of average English opinion that the

adjective "aggressive" is still held to be a damaging epithet against

Freethought; as if zeal were a good and great thing on one side of a

dispute, but wrong and vulgar on the other. Churchmen whose bells set

up pandemonium every Sunday count it an aggression to other people

to meet by summons of a handbill to discuss whether church-going is

reasonable. And they are kept in countenance, unluckily, by the mass

of easy-going or timid unbelievers, who, not caring or daring to act

on their own convictions, keep up their self-esteem by speaking ill of

those who do so.

In the mouths of some people, of course, "aggressive" means "rude" or

"offensive;" and it is still common to say that Bradlaugh was a coarse

assailant of other men's convictions. The charge was early brought

against him. Lecturing on Malthusianism in 1862, after alluding to the

abuse levelled at him in that connection by the Unitarian organ, he

said:--

"I did not consider it necessary to make much justification when I

was attacked some months ago by a person who is rather famous for the

vehemence of his criticism than for the soundness of his logic; but

... it may be perhaps not out of place to notice the way in which that

sort of criticism has been circulated throughout the country. I have

taken up Irish journals; I have taken up Scotch journals; and I have

found myself represented as the only advocate of this great party ...

who uses in his oratory, who writes for his readers, disregarding all

morality, coarse, brutal, and degrading phrases. Now I appeal to you

who are here this morning, and there are some who have listened to me

from my boyhood, whether in my attack on the theologies of the world

I have permitted my tongue to utter any coarse phraseology, whether

in attacking or destroying them? (Applause) ... I admit that I have

been rough and rude in my attacks on what I consider to be wrong and

injurious, but I have been always reverent and kindly to every one who

has seemed to me to be striving for the benefit of humankind."

How true is this claim can be easily learned by reading his pamphlets,

or his book on "Genesis." That volume may be objected to as a dry

digest of much learning and discussion, but it certainly cannot be

accused either of violence or of flippancy. Its history is worth noting

here. In 1856 he issued a Freethinking commentary entitled, "The

Bible, What it is," which went as far as Isaiah. This being sold out

(it is now so scarce that the present writer has not been able to get

a copy),[97] he issued in 1865 a rewritten edition, covering only the

Pentateuch, but larger than the first; and this in turn was sold out.

In 1881-82, while fighting his great battle against Parliament, he set

himself the drudgery and discipline of beginning again with Genesis,

enlarging his commentary from his later reading to such an extent that

this, the largest volume of the three, only covers the first eleven

chapters of the first book of the Pentateuch. Some of his followers

humorously speculated as to what amount of ground would be covered by

a fourth revision, should he undertake it. Whatever may be thought

of the method, it is very evidently not that of a man aiming at a

popular success of ridicule or rhetoric. Compiled at a time when he was

the target for all the bigotry of the nation, the book is eminently

dispassionate and judicial. Where most men would have grown more

vehement, he grew more calm.

[Footnote 97: There is some reason to suspect that there has happened

in this country what Bibliophile Jacob, in his preface to his addition

of Cyrano de Bergerac, declares to have happened on a large scale

in France--a zealous destruction of Freethinking works by pious

purchasers. But it lies with these to supply the main evidence.]

As a lecturer, of course, he was vigorous to the highest degree. Many

of those who have heard him at the height of his powers will agree

to the verdict that he was by far the most powerful English orator

of his time. There was something overwhelming in his force of speech

when impassioned; it lifted an audience from its feet like a storm,

and raised their intellectual conviction to a white heat of enthusiasm

for the truth it conveyed. Other speakers of his day may have been

as thrillingly impressive at their best moments; but he had great

passages in nearly every speech, and rarely faced an audience without

electrifying it. The Rev. Mr Westerby, at the close of his debate

with Bradlaugh, testified with some chagrin to the extraordinary

effectiveness of his opponent's speaking, and this in a debate full of

close and difficult argument, as the verbatim report shows. "I only

wish," said the reverend gentleman, "that I, in power of speech, were

as powerful as he. Then I might have done honour to my cause.... Only

by the power of his speech, and by the marvellous energy with which

he can endow it, can I understand the impression he has produced upon

you." But the reader of the debate can understand it without hearing

the delivery. At its highest stress the energy is controlled and

intelligized; never is the argument confused or let slip; never does

vigour lapse to coarseness. He was certainly not an abusive or even a

harsh controversialist; he dealt much less in invective and imputation

than most men in his place would have felt justified in doing. One of

the strongest of his censures of antagonists in matters of argument

is passed on the late Bishop of Peterborough, Dr Magee, who was a

sufficiently reckless polemist. The passage occurs in the second of the

three (unwritten) lectures he delivered in Norwich, in reply to three

sermons by the Bishop:--

"I have now to complain of something still worse than that the Bishop

should have forgotten his Bible, entirely ignored the Thirty-Nine

Articles, and occasionally in the hurry of rapid speech contradicted

his previous sentences. All these are matters at which, in even an

extraordinary man burdened with a bishop's dignity, we need not wonder

at all; but when we find him blundering in metaphysics, when we find

him making mistakes which a man versed in the merest rudiments of Mill

or the Scotch and German metaphysicians would not make--when we find

the Bishop so blundering, either wilfully or ignorantly, it puts me in

a position of extreme difficulty."

This on Butler is also, for Bradlaugh, exceptionally severe:--

"Bishop Butler's argument on the doctrine of necessity is that which

one might expect from a hired _nisi prius_ advocate, but which is

read with regret coming from a gentleman who ought to be striving to

convince his erring brethren by the words of truth alone."[98]

[Footnote 98: Pamphlet on Heresy, p. 48.]

A writer, in whose anti-religious polemic such perfectly justifiable

severities are exceptional, is certainly not to be charged with

violence of speech on such matters. To his courtesy in debate there

are many testimonies. In his controversy, _e.g._, with the authors of

the "Oxford House Papers," one of them, Dr Paget, writes:--"I trust

that you will let me first acknowledge with gratitude and respect the

temperate and courteous character of your criticism. Believe me, I

sincerely appreciate it." It may not be out of place to remark that the

"Oxford House Papers" were in the opinion of some readers inexpressibly

poor stuff, respectful comment on which, in a busy world, was an

excess of consideration. And this careful courtesy was not at all, as

some have supposed, a late development in him. It is a complete error

to suppose that he began by being violent, and only acquired suavity

after much experience. It has been suggested on this head that he was

softened by the generosity with which some Christians, such as Bright,

latterly stood by him against the attacks of the bigots. But while

it is quite true that he greatly appreciated this, and while it is

further true that he found some of his very basest enemies in professed

Freethinkers of the "Agnostic" variety, it is not the fact that he

had required these experiences to make him a temperate and courteous

controversialist. That he was at all times; and he had early cause to

know that a Christian may be a gentleman and a Freethinker otherwise,

as well as _vice versa_.

Even when of set purpose ridiculing Scripture narratives in his lighter

lectures, Bradlaugh never descends from humour to coarseness; and his

jests--in such tracts as the New Lives of Abraham, Jacob, Moses, David,

and Jonah--are as perfectly within the limits of rational good taste as

those of Mr Spencer, Mr Arnold, and Mr Huxley on more august themes;

not to cite Voltaire. An old slander has lately been very carelessly

revived by the late Mr C. H. Pearson, who in his book on "National

Character" speaks of Bradlaugh as having likened the Trinity to a

monkey with three tails. Bradlaugh never did any such thing. A more

elaborated figure of that sort appeared in a condensed account once

contributed to his journal of an old lecture by a deceased Freethinker,

who had satirised human anthropomorphism by making a monkey theologise

for monkeys, as Heine makes the bear do in "Atta Troll." In the context

the figure was fitting enough; but in any case it was not Bradlaugh's.

And in reply to those persons who affect to see vulgarity, or worse,

in every jest at Christian beliefs, it may be said once for all that

Christians have from the first century onwards put themselves out of

court on this head by jealously ridiculing the beliefs of all other

believers, as well as of rationalists; that they have not stopped

at ridicule, but have in all ages freely resorted to gross calumny;

and that they in turn are not very badly used when their beliefs are

merely subjected to the satire to which they are confessedly open.

Even sheer coarseness is just as reprehensible, no more and no less,

when directed against living persons, as when directed against dead or

imaginary beings, or particular beliefs concerning them; but those who

are readiest to impute the latter offence seem to make small account

of the other, when the object of attack is an unbeliever. Bradlaugh

was never coarse; yet he was abused with unspeakable scurrility

by thousands of Christian people. And if coarseness ever arose in

his movement, as it so easily may in a popular movement involving

controversy, that movement was in any case a hundred times more sinned

against than sinning. Mrs Humphrey Ward has been at pains in two of

her novels to represent "crews" of Secularists as either resorting to

physical violence against revivalists, or showing a disposition to

resent angrily the appearance of a well-behaved clergyman at their

meetings. Such slanders would call for very strong comment were they

not so nakedly absurd. In no town in England would avowed Secularists

dare as such to molest avowed pietists even if they were inclined to

do so; and it has always been their express aim to encourage clerical

opposition and debate in their meeting-places. This is a rule without

exception. And Bradlaugh, in particular, at all times urged upon his

followers--not to abstain from gratuitous violence towards revivalists

or clergymen: he never needed to say anything on that head--but to

be very careful to give opponents no reasonable pretext for making a

disturbance against them.[99] He counselled not only orderliness but

tact; and he sharply rebuked any of his followers who would not listen

patiently to even a stupid opponent's speech. Mrs Ward's account of

Secularist organisations is an unfortunate proof that the spirit of

religiosity does not change with mere modifications of dogma. Even if

it were really found that plain, unlettered men, facing a religion

they feel to be absurd, spoke out their feeling without due courtesy

or refinement, an instructed observer would see in their reaction the

measure and correlative of the crudity of the doctrines assailed.

But people of Mrs Ward's way of thinking look tenderly on the worst

buffooneries of popular faith, and on the most brutal propaganda

of hell and blood-redemption, while recoiling sentimentally from

the perfectly sincere derision of these things by men on whom they

are blatantly thrust. The right spirit, surely, is that which would

enlighten the deluded as individuals, neither patronising them nor

abusing them. That was the attitude of Bradlaugh as a publicist and

as a man. He never talked, in public or in private, with malice, and

seldom even with disgust, of fanatics as such. He explained them, and

respected their honesty. Of certain employees of the Christian Evidence

Society he would on occasion speak publicly in the strongest terms,

as "vile things who, in fields and open spaces, where we are not to

answer for ourselves, stab our reputation and our children's." But

towards honest bigots, however imbecile, he was incapable of feeling

the virulent animosity which Mrs Ward seems to feel for the Secularists

of her imagination. To speak of him, as some journalists have done, as

accounting for all religion by "priestcraft" in the early eighteenth

century manner, is to exhibit the ignorance the statement imputes. He

carefully studied the anthropological origins of religion, lectured

specially on anthropology, and always related his teaching to the

anthropological view. Towards priests, as such, he felt no malevolence.

In fine, from first to last, the essential manliness and geniality of

his nature gave his followers a lead to humanity and chivalry in their

warfare with bigotry. If any of them, seeing the kind of reward he

received for his self-restraint, have taken satisfaction in barbing

their arrows, and in humiliating as well as defeating the enemy, they

cannot cite his example.

[Footnote 99: Thus, when in July or August 1882 an open-air Freethought

meeting was attacked by riotous Salvationists, Bradlaugh strongly urged

avoidance of provocation, and that, "above all, Freethinkers must avoid

being drawn into physical conflict with Salvationists" (_National

Reformer_, August 13, 1882).]

Once in a long while a gross circumstantial lie would move him to

strike with the handle of the dog-whip, so to speak. A case of the

kind is set forth in his tract entitled "Lying for the Glory of God:

a Letter to the Rev. Canon Fergie, B.D., Vicar of Ince, near Wigan."

This dealt with one of the idiotic anecdotes by which the truth of

Christianity and the wickedness of Atheism are proved for so many

people--anecdotes of which the absurdity and the untruth seem equally

apparent, but which find instant credence with thousands of pious

persons. Such an anecdote is the "watch story" in its complete form,

in which the blasphemer is struck dead, a detail which has to be

regretfully withheld from the narrative when it is applied to living

sceptics. Such are the endless "infidel deathbed" stories, which still

do duty in religious tracts, among them being statements concerning

the deaths of Voltaire and Paine, which have been a hundred times

circumstantially refuted. Such is the venerable anecdote of the nurse

who would never again attend an infidel's deathbed--a story which is

told with religious impartiality of Rousseau, Voltaire, Paine, and

Hume, and will doubtless be told in due course of Bradlaugh. In recent

Christian propaganda, the growing humanity of the age is seen in a

disposition to convert the atheist rather than to send him to hell

shrieking. But all these anecdotes alike have one quality in common;

they are rigorously untrue, though they are never told in the same way

by two Christians running. One sample story of seventeen (more or less)

"leading Secularists," of whom fourteen came to bad ends, after signing

a blasphemous covenant with blood for ink, does not on investigation

yield even a grain of fact. In another narrative, sixteen "leaders" are

represented as having all re-embraced Christianity. Of the sixteen,

over a dozen are unknown to Secularism, and one known convert had been

reconverted to Freethought. It was partly the lawyer in Bradlaugh that

made him treat these anecdotes with seriousness and severity, finding

the lie circumstantial some degrees worse than the lie conventional

or sophistical. He specially detested downright fabrication of facts.

But he also had a chivalrous loathing of the tactic which stabbed a

doctrine in the back instead of meeting it in face; and for his own

part he never used the means he might to assail religion through

the scandals of its daily record. He would not stoop to collect the

stories of frightful "fidel" deathbeds, which surpass the contrary

sort as much in force as in truth; and he never would collect in his

journal the frequent stories of clerical misconduct which appear in the

ordinary press, though all his life he was being libelled by clerics.

He was indeed a dangerous enemy when provoked, but he had little

vindictiveness. His interests were too broad, his relation to life too

genial, to permit of his being satisfied with the triumphs of feud. He

claimed for himself with perfect truth: "I have attacked the Bible, but

never the letter alone; the Church, but never have I confined myself

to a mere assault on its practices. I have deemed that I attacked

theology best in asserting most the fulness of humanity. I have

regarded iconoclasticism as a means, not as an end. The work is weary,

but the end is well." And this may serve as a compendious answer to

the kind of criticism which disposes of Atheism by calling it "cold."

It would be much nearer to the truth to say that many Atheists have

recoiled from religion because of its very heartlessness and gloom; and

because the "warmth" of those who find joy in the evangelical doctrine

of salvation strikes a healthy mind as hardly less repulsive than

the "warmth" of alcoholism. The assumption that a man who puts aside

the doctrine of a future life is cold-hearted, was never more absurd

than when applied to the case of Bradlaugh. But its full absurdity is

perhaps made most clear by comparing the doctrine of Lessing and Kant

as to the nullity of Judaism as a religion, in respect of its lack of

an authoritative doctrine of heaven, with the common run of rhetoric

about the strength of the Semitic religious feeling.

§ 5.

It ought not to be necessary at this time of day to offer a

justification for Bradlaugh's doctrine on the ethical side, his

position being simply that of modern science. But just as the avowal

of Atheism and Materialism gives rise to endless misrepresentation

of those statements of opinion, so the avowal of Atheism and

Utilitarianism in morals gives rise to all sorts of moral imputations.

On the one hand there is the reasonable criticism which falls to be

passed on imperfect or exaggerated expression of the utilitarian

principle; on the other hand there are the imputations which ignorant,

confused, and other persons cast on any statement of Utilitarianism

whatever. Many orthodox people have in this matter the indestructible

advantage of being unable to understand the rationalist argument--as

may be very clearly seen in the debate between Mr Bradlaugh and

the Rev. Dr M'Cann on the morality and philosophy of Secularism.

Such opponents go on fervently affirming their consciousness of

the obligation to do what they feel to be "right," "irrespective

of consequences," and insisting that this is the negation of

utilitarianism. It is of course no such thing. The real ground of

strife between religious and rational morality lies, or lay, in the old

doctrine that the _standard_ of right is divinely "revealed," and that

we do right in virtue of divine command. That doctrine once abandoned,

supernaturalism in morals is a mere matter of words. To admit that we

have no certain light or unvarying strength of feeling as to what is

right in a given case, and merely to affirm that we have a "divine

call" from conscience to do what we think right when our minds are

made up, is to surrender the heart of the religious position. This is

what was done by Dr M'Cann and the Rev. Mr Armstrong in their debates

with Bradlaugh; both clergymen nevertheless supposing themselves to be

rebutting utilitarianism. The utilitarian position is of course (1)

that the instinct to do "what we feel to be right" is merely organic,

and often goes with conduct that is on rational grounds demonstrably

wrong; (2) that the business of ethics is to settle what conduct is

reasonably to be held right or wrong; and (3) that though the sense of

utility is not the primary or conscious motive of all actions, it is

the test by which disputed action is to be controlled. Of course it

will at times be fallaciously applied, as regarded from the point of

view of developed sympathy; but it can never be misapplied as grossly

as the religious standard has been, and it remains the final standard

of ethical appeal. Even the religionists who argue that utilitarianism

is a "pernicious" doctrine virtually admit this in their very choice

of epithet. The good of society is even for them the final criterion.

They never hesitate, further, to seek to influence the minds of the

young by the primitively utilitarian warning, "Be sure your sin will

find you out." Yet they constantly denounce the Secularist doctrine as

encouraging men to make primary self-interest the beginning and end of

moral principle, when on the face of the case it subjects self-interest

to public interest by its working formula of "the greatest good of the

greatest number." The religious argument against that formula always

ends in putting the fancy case of the starving man with a starving

family, who steals a loaf of bread from somebody who does not miss it.

The religious implication is that the whole family had better starve

than commit such a theft--a doctrine which may be left to the decision

of common-sense. It is only to be wished that Christian politics even

remotely approached the scrupulosity paraded in this controversy.

As for the point of disinterestedness, the history of Freethought in

general, and the life of Bradlaugh in particular, will serve to show

whether or not the recognition of utility as the final test of the

right or wrong of actions has led men to put the low utility above the

high, the near above the far. To do the former would be to abandon the

very avowal of the principle, since it always brings odium and injury

on the avowers. The very persistence of an unpopular movement is the

decisive proof that its promoters have sought higher ends than money

gain. What the utilitarian principle has done for Bradlaugh and those

like-minded is not to give them the primary impulse to fight for truth

and right as they see them, but to give them an enduring support in the

battle. The first impulse springs from veracity of character _plus_

knowledge; but it is sure to be opposed by bitter criticism, imputing

to the straightforward course all manner of evil results. When the

reformer is convinced that not only truth and justice but the highest

utility itself is on his side, he is thrice armed. And if with some

unbelievers the rejection of transcendental moral principles has meant

the return to a timid or a base conformity, they are at least no worse

guided than before, and the blame of their dissimulation must lie with

the religious system which not only counsels but enforces it, not with

the doctrine which classes social dissimulation as a vice. Certain it

is that under the auspices of the Christian creed England has lived

mainly for low and narrow utilities, and not for the high and broad;

the transcendental creed availing only to worsen matters by adding to

the forces of evil the element of persecuting bigotry. Rationalism

once for all excludes the last factor; and if it ever lends itself to

a popular disregard of the great utilities and a pursuit of the small,

which are the undoing of the great, it will assuredly not be in virtue

of following such a lead as Bradlaugh's.

Of his influence on his followers those can best speak who have

mixed with them. Personal and magnetic as it was, it depended for

its continuance on the unvarying nobility of his appeal to the best

instincts--to courage, honour, justice, and the love of truth. Hundreds

of men--men to whom the generality of pulpit sermons are either inane

commonplaces or maudlin nonsense--can testify to the fashion in which

he stirred them to high sympathies and generous determinations, making

life for all of them, however narrow their sphere, a vista of worthy

activities and abiding consolations.

It is part of the condemnation of modern orthodoxy that its warfare

with Atheism has run mainly to libel--not merely libel on individual

Atheists, but sweeping aspersion of the whole movement. The records

are embarrassing in the sheer multitude of the samples; and one

utterance may serve for a thousand. In the early part of Bradlaugh's

Parliamentary struggle an orthodox periodical named _Social Notes_, of

which the Marquis of Townshend was editorial director, made the typical

assertion:--

"It is a well-known fact that there is no criminal so fearless in

doing evil, so hopelessly bad and beyond chance of recovery, as the

Atheist criminal is. Atheism and ignorance commonly create the first

step to crime. As Atheism grows in the minds of the lower classes, so

crime increases."

The statement can only have come from a writer of a partially criminal

type, since it states not merely a gross untruth, but one for which the

writer cannot possibly have believed he had any evidence. So far from

the fact being as he says, it is perfectly well established that there

are almost no Atheist criminals. Readers can satisfy themselves on this

head by reading the chapter on "Atheism in Prison" in the "Jottings

from Jail" of the Rev. J. W. Horsley,[100] a writer not at all disposed

to say any good of Atheism. But the folly of the statement cited will

probably be recognised by most people on simply reflecting that crime

was most abundant in the ages when Atheism was practically unknown;

that it is common now in countries where there is no anti-religious

propaganda whatever among the common people; that the professional

brigands of Greece and Italy are faithful children of the Church; and

that nearly every murderer executed in this country avows beforehand a

confident assurance of being welcomed in Paradise. Only one Secularist,

so far as the present writer is aware, has ever been convicted of

murder; and he was no typical criminal, but a man congenitally liable

to delirious fits of passion. When he knew of their approach he warned

the people about him not to thwart him; and only in one of these fits,

on intense provocation from a man who had wronged him, did he strike a

deadly blow with a chance weapon. He expressly forbade petitions for

commutation of his sentence, deliberately preferring to end a marred

and maimed life.

[Footnote 100: Fisher Unwin.]

Those who really suppose Atheism tends to promote crime know as

little of the nature of criminals as of the logic of Atheism. The

immense majority of criminals are unintelligent, and as such are

immeasurably more likely to be superstitious than to be atheistic.

A man of bad character may indeed be an Atheist in virtue of his

reasoning powers; but the same powers will tend to withhold him from

breach of the criminal law. The recent insinuations of the present

Bishop of Manchester as to the effects of secular education in the

colony of Victoria will impress no one who is conversant with criminal

statistics;[101] and are repudiated by those qualified to speak in the

colony itself. Of similar weight are the clerical assertions that the

Anarchist mania in France is a result of the "godless" teaching of the

public schools. It has been shown on the contrary that some of the most

prominent Anarchist miscreants have had a careful clerical training;

while the Anarchists themselves have never produced a criminal to

compare with the priest Bruneau. The organised _Libres-Penseurs_ of

France have made a speciality of ethics, publishing more matter on that

head than on any other.

[Footnote 101: The matter was dealt with at some length in the

_National Reformer_ of January 15, 1893.]

It is not necessary to answer again, but it is edifying to cite, one

of the many utterances in which Atheism has been held up to horror

as tending to universal bloodshed. Such an utterance was this of

Bishop Magee, delivered in his cathedral of Peterborough in June 1880,

and thus specially made to bear on the claim of Bradlaugh to sit in

Parliament:--

"A nation of Atheists must be a nation of revolutionists; their

history must be a history of revolution marked by intervals of

grinding, cruel, pitiless, and unreproved slaughter, because for

weakness there would be no appeal to the supreme power against present

tyranny."

In the rhetoric of religion, folly and frenzy are thus sometimes so

mingled that together they make censure shade into derision, and

derision into melancholy. Neither reason nor experience can hinder

some men from putting the wildest figments in place of the plainest

teachings of history. Dr Magee had before him the history of his own

faith, which began in bitter and sanguinary schism, and within a few

hundred years had raised deadly civil war throughout the civilised

world; which has made more pretexts for war throughout its era than

could possibly have arisen without it; and which in our own country

was the inspiration of some of the worst strifes in our annals. He

had before him the judgment of Bacon, unwillingly following on an

unreasoned criticism, that "Atheism did never perturb states ...; but

superstition hath been the confusion of many states." And the Bishop's

rant, despicable in itself, was used to excite new Christian malice

against a man who had again and again met the verbal violence of

pro-revolutionaries with the strongest protests against revolutionary

methods; who loved peace and hated war; and who had time and again

resisted and denounced the unjust English wars to which the Bishop's

Church had given its blessing. Thus is Atheism impugned by piety. At

the very time when Dr Magee's rhetoric was being used to keep Bradlaugh

out of Parliament, the National Secular Society was on his prompting

petitioning strongly against the war waged by the English Government on

the Boers in South Africa.[102]

[Footnote 102: In October (?) 1882, the Quaker _Friend_ testified to

the "melancholy" fact that "with, of course, honourable exceptions,

the most inveterate opponents of militarism are to be found among

secularists and socialists." Soon afterwards Bishop Ellicott

regretfully avowed that unbelief had acquired new and dangerous

characteristics, in that it "now was very often found co-existent

with what they were bound to speak of as a moral and in many cases a

philanthropic life."]

The only form of the orthodox imputation which is even decently

plausible is the suggestion that the loss of religious belief may

leave some men more ready than before to venture on vice that is not

legally punishable. This is no doubt theoretically possible; and in

cases where boys have had such a religiously bad education that they

know of no rational veto on misconduct, harm may sometimes arise on

their finding that the religion taught them is incredible. But young

men who reason so far are likely to reason further; and in any case a

few plain considerations will serve to convince any candid mind that

there is no causal connection between scepticism and vice; though it

stands to reason that the habit of scepticism will promote the critical

discussion on the institution of marriage. On the one hand, the sexual

instinct has in all ages gone to the worst excess under the auspices

of religions which expressly glorified asceticism; and the facts of

the life of the ages of faith in Europe make it clear that, even on

the orthodox definition of vice, there cannot possibly be more of it

in the future than there has been in the past. On the other hand, the

utilitarian arguments against vice, properly so called, are much better

fitted to impress than the religious; and they leave no such loophole

as the others inevitably do in respect of the Christian doctrine of

pardon for sin, to say nothing of the iniquity of the Christian ethic

which holds one and the same act ruinous in a woman and venial in a

man. Of course, if the celibate life, and marriage without possibility

of divorce, be made the standard of virtue, rationalism is likely to

give piety plenty of occasion for outcry in matters of morals, as in

matters of opinion.

However that may be, it has to be noted that Bradlaugh was not at all

"advanced," as things go, on the subject of the marriage institution.

Constantly accused of endorsing "Free Love" doctrines, he as constantly

repudiated the charge. In 1881 we find him indignantly protesting that

not only bad men, but men of whose honesty in other things he was sure,

"constantly repeated, as though they were his, views on Socialism which

he did not hold, views on marriage which never had an equivalent in

his feelings, and declarations on prostitution which were abhorrent

to his thought."[103] The "Free Love" charge was commonly founded on

his alleged acceptance of the whole doctrine of the work entitled

"The Elements of Social Science." No such acceptance ever occurred.

He was the last man to vilify a benevolent and temperate writer for

doctrines with which he could not agree; but in the reprint of his

pamphlet on "Jesus, Shelley, and Malthus,"[104] he explicitly wrote of

the author in question: "His work well deserves careful study; there

are in it many matters of physiology on which I am incompetent to

express an opinion, and some points of ethics from which I expressly

and strongly dissent." Not only did he thus reject the "advanced"

doctrine of sexual freedom: he never committed himself to any such

proposition as that of Mill, that the institution of the family needs

"more fundamental alterations than remain to be made in any other great

social institution," or that of James Mill, cited without disapproval

by his son, as to the probable development of freedom in the sexual

relation.[105]

[Footnote 103: Address at the National Secular Society's Conference.]

[Footnote 104: Published in 1861. Reprinted 1883.]

[Footnote 105: J. S. Mill's Autobiography, pp. 107, 167. A still

more striking illustration of the way in which one rationalist may

"steal the horse" while another may not "look over the hedge," is the

following passage in Mill's book:--"On these grounds I was not only as

ardent as ever for democratic institutions, but earnestly hoped that

Owenite, St. Simonian, and all other anti-property doctrines might

spread widely among the poorer classes; _not that I thought these

doctrines true_, or desired that they should be acted on, but in order

that the higher classes _might be made to see that they had far more to

fear_ from the poor when uneducated than when educated."]

It was thus grossly unjust to cast upon the Secularist movement, as

did Bishop Fraser of Manchester in the worst stress of Bradlaugh's

parliamentary struggle, the imputation of promoting positive cruelty on

the part of men towards women. That episode was for many a melancholy

proof of the perverting power of bigotry in a naturally conscientious

man. The Bishop publicly put it as a natural deduction from Secularist

teaching that a man might put away his wife when she grew old and ugly,

or "sick, or otherwise disagreeable to him," simply because she thus

ceased to please him; and when a Secularist wrote him to point out the

injustice of this assertion, and the nature of the ordinary rationalist

view of marriage, his Grace disingenuously quoted the statement that

Secularists repudiated the "sacredness" of marriage, without adding the

explanation which his correspondent had given as to the proper force of

that term. The whole outburst was an angry and unscrupulous attempt to

put upon Secularist teaching the vice which admittedly flourished in

the Bishop's diocese among non-Secularists. All the while, the doctrine

he had put upon Secularism lay in his own Bible, and nowhere else:--

"When a man taketh a wife, and marrieth her, then shall it be, if she

find no favour in his eyes, because he hath found some unseemly thing

in her, that he shall write her a bill of divorcement, and give it in

her hand, and send her out of his house" (Deut. xxiv. 1).

These and other doctrines had been made by Bradlaugh part of his

indictment of Bible morality. He saw that while women are dependent,

power of self-divorce cannot justly be allowed to husbands. He was

certainly in favour of greater facilities for divorce; but he took no

part in the discussion as to whether marriage is a failure; and he

always argued for a legal contract, in the interests of the woman and

children, as against informal unions; though, of course, he passed no

moral censure on women in a state of economic independence who chose

the latter. His own sad experience never made him decry marriage; and

he never would have subscribed to the doctrine of Professor Pearson,

that "love should have the privilege of his wings," save in so far

as he would give freedom of legal divorce. In short, he did not

realise the fancy picture of "modern Materialism" painted by religious

sentiment, any more than the fancy picture of the pragmatist. He was

not even a lover of "realism" in fiction. Like Büchner (whose favourite

author is Shakespeare), he could not enjoy Zola; and on Hugo's death

he eulogised that poet in express contrast to the new school which had

begun to write him down.

But he did not set up to be a literary critic, or an æsthetic person in

any sense. His own art was oratory, and of that he was master by dint

not of conscious study, but of sincerity, energy, and endless activity.

He spoke to persuade, to convince, to crush; and he never spoke save on

a conviction. It thus lay in his nature that he should be a politician

as earnestly as he was a Freethinker. His Atheism, his logic, his

utilitarianism, all combined to make him a strenuous reformer in the

field of government, and a full half of his whole activity--more than

half in the latter years--was turned to making life better and saner

than it had been under the regimen of religion. The absurd pretence

that Atheism makes men pessimistic and supine becomes peculiarly absurd

when tested by his career. He was no optimist: he had no delusions

about the speedy perfectibility of men, singly or in mass; but no man

was less inclined to the new pessimism, which turns its philosophy to

the account of commonplace conservatism all round. A clerical opponent,

debating with him, protested that Atheists ought to be in a state of

black despair at the evil of the world, which the reverend gentleman

on his part viewed with serenity, holding that the God who wrought

it must intend to put matters right hereafter. A lay study of the

problem, however, reveals the fact that hopeful and despairing frames

of mind are not as a rule determined by theoretic beliefs one way

or the other. Bradlaugh had the good fortune to combine the keenest

interest in ideas and the clearest insight into human character with

a boundless enthusiasm for action; and he perfectly recognised that a

similar temperament in the latter respect might go with what he held

to be delusion in philosophy. It is the fashion of conformists without

beliefs to speak of propagandist rationalism as "intolerant"--a use of

the term which, though it may be at times permissible in common talk,

is a complete perversion of its essential purport. Applied to action,

the word has no proper force save as implying the wish or attempt to

curtail freedom and inflict positive injury on the score of opinion.

No such charge can justly be made against Freethinkers in general,

or Bradlaugh in particular. The practice of boycotting for opinion's

sake he detested and denounced, and never in any way resorted to. He

even carried the spirit of "tolerance" to an extreme degree in his own

affairs, being careful, as his daughter testifies, to avoid giving

his children anything like specific anti-theological teaching, on the

ground that the opinions of the young ought not to be stereotyped for

them on points which they ought to reconsider for themselves when they

grow up. In intercourse with those about him he was equally scrupulous;

and all the contributors to his journal can tell how complete was the

freedom he gave them to express in its pages opinions from which he

dissented. In this he was far superior to many who have aspersed him

as overbearing. It was a point of honour with him to give a hearing

in his columns to all manner of opposition to his own views; and no

man was ever less apt to let his philosophical convictions bias him

in his practical or political relations with people of another way of

thinking. Hence he was able not only to follow, but to follow with

a chivalrous devotion, such a political leader as Mr Gladstone, of

whose latter writings on religious matters he found it difficult to

speak without a sense of humorous humiliation.[106] But his political

teaching must be separately considered.

[Footnote 106: His comment on Mr Gladstone's reply to Colonel Ingersoll

is, however, a model of respectful exposure of a very bad case.]

CHAPTER II.

POLITICAL DOCTRINE AND WORK.

§ 1.

In combining the propaganda of Freethought with that of Republican

Radicalism, Bradlaugh was carrying on the work begun in England by

Paine, and continued by Richard Carlile, men whose memory he honoured

for those qualities of courage, sincerity, and constancy which were the

pith of his own character. The bringing of reason to bear at once on

the things of Church and of State, of creed and of conduct, was for him

a matter of course, as it has been for the great majority of Atheists,

from Holbach onwards, and he held firmly to the old conviction that for

free and rational men the only right form of Government is a Republic.

He had all Paine's energetic disdain of the monarchic principle in

theory and in practice, and, coming to his work in the latter half of

the century, he could stand up for Republicanism without incurring the

extreme penalties which fell so heavily on the devoted head of Carlile

that his hold of his rationalist doctrine gave way under the strain of

his struggle, the mind seeking lethargic rest before the body found the

final repose. Still the great reaction against the French Revolution,

which had made the name of Paine a byword, and the life of Carlile a

series of imprisonments, was still far too strong in the fifties and

sixties to permit of an avowed Republican and Atheist being regarded

without horror by the middle and upper classes. The more famous

Carlyle, with all his loud esteem for sincerity and louder repudiation

of cant, never dreamt of saying a plain word against the monarchy

any more than against the current religion, though his political

theories were at all times as far asunder from current monarchism as

from democracy. He even went out of his way to speak smoothly of a

royalty which did nothing. For a generation to which Carlyle figured

as outspoken and veridical, therefore, anything so practical as

Republicanism was wildly revolutionary, and so Bradlaugh figured from

the first to the average imagination as a violent politician.

Strictly speaking, he was in a sense more violent in his politics than

in his anti-theology, because political strife is necessarily more a

matter of attack on living persons than is the doctrinal strife between

Atheism and Theism. As a republican he could not avoid discussing the

personalities of the Hanoverian dynasty, inasmuch as the practical

strength of royalism lies in the hereditary self-abasement of men

before the hereditary royal person as such, not in any common hold

on a monarchic theory of Government. To people who gloried in living

under the Guelphs, an exposure of the Guelphs was the only relevant

or intelligible answer. We may indeed say generally of monarchy what

Strauss said of dogma, that the true criticism of it is its history.

But the practical sanity which in Bradlaugh balanced the fieriest zeal,

showed him from the first that Republicanism could only advance by way

of culture and reason, never by way of violence. He "spoke" bullets

and bayonets, but he never for an instant countenanced their use in

English politics; and he had always a mixture of wrath and contempt

for those who blustered of carrying by force, or threats of force, any

reform in the Constitution. Even while he was delivering in lectures

his "Impeachment of the House of Brunswick," he constantly declared

that the mass of the people were not yet qualified to constitute a

republican state; and he declared as much when, in 1873, he spoke at

the banquet given by the then Republican leaders at Madrid in his

honour as delegate from the Republican Conference which had just been

held at Birmingham.

The almost entire subsidence of Republican agitation in England within

the last twenty years, after the considerable show of Republican

feeling which followed on the fall of the Empire in France, is an

interesting and instructive fact, worth a little explanation here.

It does not mean that the nation is less ready for a Republic; the

fact is quite the other way. Recent tests have shown that in the

average working-class Liberal and Radical Club, when the question

is plainly raised, there is virtually no feeling in favour of the

retention of Monarchy. The old devotion to the monarch as such has

almost completely passed away among the more intelligent workers, and

now subsists only among their weaker brethren, and in the middle and

upper classes. Political movements, however, are made and marred not

by pure reasoning but by special stresses of feeling, and there has

been little or nothing in the annals of the past twenty years to set

up a new stress of feeling against the monarchy in England, while

there has been much that has tended to put the republican ideal in the

background. It is hardly to the credit of the nation that it lays less

store by a great principle or ideal than by concrete points of lower

importance; but such is and must long be the fact. The movement which

led to the Republican Conference in 1873, to begin with, suffered from

the still vivid recollection of the horrors of the Commune. Next it was

found that among its adherents were many who were less concerned to set

up a British Republic than to further by that means the independence

of Ireland. Thus the movement was in itself weakened by want of unity

of motive and purpose, and could make little headway against the vast

forces of habit and prejudice which buttress the Throne. Even what

headway it did make was due largely to the then very common feeling

of personal hostility to the Prince of Wales, whose reputed character

offended many who would not of their own accord have been likely to

raise the question of Monarchy _versus_ Republic. Another ground for

hostility to the Crown was and is the sufficiently solid one of its

cost; but here again the spectacle of the financial corruption in

leading Republics has tended to damp down anti-monarchic feeling. It

is pretty clear that, barring any new and special cause for outcry

against the Throne, its abolition in this country will only result from

the slow accumulation of indifference and of educated aversion to the

snobbery which cherishes and is cherished by it. This certainly cannot

take place during the lifetime of the reigning sovereign, whose age and

popularity alike go to silence serious agitation. It may or may not

come about during the next generation.

Bradlaugh used to be quoted as saying that he intended that the heir

apparent should never come to the Throne. He never said anything so

idle, though in his youth he thought it possible that the Republic

might be attained in his lifetime. As years went on, his insight

into human nature led him to feel that agitation for an ideal form

of Government was less directly fruitful than agitation against the

abuses of class privilege; and in the last dozen years of his life,

his political work went mainly to reforms within the lines of the

Constitution. Apart from this partial change of tactic, his position

underwent no change from first to last. His political doctrine may be

broadly described as a demand for the fullest admission of the people

to the rights of self-government, and further, the application of the

powers thus acquired to the removal or reform of all laws framed in

the interest of the upper few. This was the ideal he had formed for

himself in his youth, and he declined to substitute for it the ideal

of Socialism, which had begun to be vaguely popular towards the end of

his life. The refusal rested on his experience, and on his character.

In his youth he had seen a great impression made by the teaching and

the achievement of Robert Owen, whose propaganda came so closely in

relation with that of Secularism that in several towns the old halls

of the Owenites have been till recent years, or are still, carried

on by the surviving followers of Owen, as Secularist meeting-places.

For Owen, whom he had met in youth, Bradlaugh had much esteem. "No

Socialist myself," he wrote in later life, "I yet cannot but concede

that [Owen's] movement had enormous value, if only as a protest

against that terrible and inhuman competitive struggle, in which the

strong were rewarded for their strength, and no mercy was shown to the

weakest."[107] But he was profoundly impressed by the extravagance of

Owen's estimate of the present possibilities of human nature; and the

later Socialism, like the earlier, represented for him the optimism

of unpractical men, with the difference that the later agitators had

at once much less gift for social organisation than Owen, and a far

more difficult programme to realise. Thus, where Owen set himself to

create a State within the State, Bradlaugh addressed himself to making

the political State truly democratic--a course the wisdom of which is

admitted by the action of the Socialists, who now adopt it. He was in

a general sense the successor of the Chartists; and in that connection

it is impossible not to feel that if such a one as he had been in

the place of Fergus O'Connor, the political advance of the past half

century would have been considerably quickened. As it was, his labours

have probably counted more than those of any other single man in his

day to rouse the workers in the towns to vigorous political action.

Before they had the vote, he not only helped to lead the agitation

for their enfranchisement, but appealed to them directly on the

issues which he wanted their suffrage to settle. It is the fashion of

the new Socialism to represent that the old Radicalism wrought for

political enfranchisement without any notion of what use the vote

was to be turned to. Common sense and common candour will put that

account of things aside without much trouble. Bradlaugh for one had

very definite notions of what he wanted the vote to do. His programme

was both positive and negative. He strongly supported the Radical

demand for retrenchment of an expenditure which was always tending

to benefit, not the many, but the few; and he detested the policy of

"safe" foreign aggression which, after being long associated with the

name of Palmerston, came to be identified with that of Beaconsfield.

The fact that this policy had the support of some who later figured as

Socialists, did not increase his esteem for their after-course. His

sympathy with the small and weak nationalities whom England selected

for attack was rooted in the intense sense of justice which inspired

his whole life. After working for struggling Italy and Poland, he

refused to stand by in silence while his own country unscrupulously

made war on Afghans, on Zulus, and on Egyptians, on pretexts which all

Englishmen would have execrated had they been put forward by Russians.

And as he never made popularity his guiding principle, he as instantly

and resolutely opposed the aggressions of Mr Gladstone's Government as

those of the Tories. In none of the sins of modern Liberalism, whether

in Africa or in Ireland, was he implicated. But he had a constructive

as well as a limitary ideal, a home policy as well as a foreign; and

whereas his course on the latter head will now be endorsed by most

Liberals, his social doctrine is still in need of exposition and

justification.

[Footnote 107: "Five Dead Men whom I knew," p. 6.]

§ 2.

A notable fact in the history of popular Freethought in England has

been its association with the social teaching of Malthus, which

first came before the world only a few years after Paine's attack on

orthodoxy. There is nothing to show that Paine ever realised what

a blow was struck at his optimistic Theism, by the essay which his

fellow-Theist Malthus wrote to rebut the optimist assumptions on

the "Political Justice" of Godwin, a Freethinker who held by the

revolutionary optimism in the sphere of politics, while tending away

from Deistic optimism in philosophy. Paine, who was certainly as much

bent on construction as on destruction, sketched a socio-political

system which will be found by many readers as impressive to-day as

it was found by Pitt. He proposed on the one hand a progressive

income-tax, which should yield new revenue and break up large estates,

and on the other hand a system of stipends to poor families; annuities

to decayed tradesmen and others over fifty, increasing after sixty;

provision for the education of the children of the poor; donations for

births, marriages, and some funerals; and "employment at all times

for the casual poor in the cities of London and Westminster." Save as

regards the old age pensions, which represent a great improvement on

pauper relief, and the education scheme, all of this plan comes under

the destructive criticism of Malthus, inasmuch as it does not recognise

the fatal tendency of an untaught population to multiply in excess of

the economic possibilities of maintenance. The plan of allowancing

poor families at so much per head would have quickened immensely the

progress towards national bankruptcy which was carried so far under the

old Poor Law. It would have bred paupers by the thousand.

The demonstration of Malthus naturally was not relished by the

Radicals, to whom it was first addressed; and Godwin in particular met

it with indecent acrimony, as did Coleridge, the Conservative. But

the next generation of Freethinkers assimilated the argument, and a

certain propaganda for the restriction of families was carried on by

Richard Carlile. It is a remarkable fact that two Christian priests

have laid two corner-stones of the structure of Atheistic polity for

modern England. Butler in confuting the Deists wrought as much for

Atheism as for orthodoxy; Malthus, in meeting the remaining Deists

on the ground of sociology, confuted their optimism on the practical

side. Freethought finally accepted both services, rectifying Malthus

as it rectified Butler; and under Bradlaugh it made for science all

round. Malthusianism in its original form certainly lent itself to

Toryism; and no amount of benevolence on the part of Malthus could

make his doctrine acceptable to democracy so long as it was tied down

to his Christian ethic. The step which reconciled the knowledge of

the law of population with energetic Radicalism in politics was taken

when rationalists laid it down that the prudential check need not mean

prolonged celibacy. Teaching as he did the all-importance of checking

the birth-rate, and knowing as he did the possibility of bringing

about the restraint, Bradlaugh had no further cause for misgiving as

to political progress than his recognition of the general capacity of

human nature to blunder.

He took up the neo-Malthusian position emphatically in his early

pamphlet on "Jesus, Shelley, and Malthus," published in 1861, a

somewhat youthfully rhetorical, but still a very notable presentment

of the three main influences successively brought to bear on the

problem of poverty--the spirit of religious submission, the spirit of

humanitarian revolt, and the spirit of science. He pleaded for the

last. "An acquaintance with political economy," he there declares,

"is as necessary to the working man as is a knowledge of navigation

to the master of a ship. It is the science of social life, the social

science." And he was able in those days of the "orthodox" economics to

cite in support of his definition, from the high priest of orthodoxy,

a deliverance which may surprise readers whose knowledge of the old

economics is not commensurate with their censure of it.

"The object of political economy," says Mr M'Culloch, "is to point

out the means by which the industry of man may be rendered most

productive of those necessaries, comforts, and enjoyments which

constitute wealth; to ascertain the circumstances most favourable for

its accumulation, the proportion in which it is divided among the

different classes of the community, and the mode in which it may be

most advantageously consumed."

And in another early pamphlet on "Poverty and its Effect on the

Political Condition of the People," first published in 1863, he put as

one of his mottoes, after a more guarded sentence from John Mill, this

from Sir James Steuart:--

"The object of political economy is to secure the means of subsistence

to all the inhabitants, to obviate every circumstance which might

render this precarious, to provide everything necessary for supplying

the wants of society, and to employ the inhabitants so as to make

their several interests accord with their supplying each other's

wants."

But his application of the principle was democratic and Neo-Malthusian,

not Collectivist. "Unless," he wrote, "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." And for years before this

he had persistently pressed the point in his lectures, steadily defying

the odium which his action brought upon him. As early as 1862 we find

him temperately replying to denunciation on this head in a lecture on

"Malthusianism and its connection with Civil and Religious Liberty,"

of which a partial report happened to be taken in shorthand. "It may

almost seem unwise," he remarked, "to be continually putting this

subject before you; but really I find myself so misrepresented, and so

liable to be misunderstood, in quarters where one would expect better

things, that you must not wonder if I seek to make it clear to you why

I persist in this advocacy." He here pressed the law of population as a

fundamental datum of political science.

"I shall urge upon you this morning that there can be no permanent

civil and religious liberty, no permanent and enduring freedom for

humankind, no permanent and enduring equality amongst men and women,

no permanent and enduring fraternity, until the subject which Malthus

wrote upon is thoroughly examined, and until the working men make that

of which Malthus was so able an exponent the science of their everyday

life; until, in fact, they grapple with it, and understand that the

poverty which they now have to contend against must always produce the

present evils which oppress them."

Again:--

"Poverty, so long as it exists, is in fact the impassable barrier

between man and civil and religious liberty. You can never have true

liberty so long as men are steeped in poverty. So long as men do not

comprehend what liberty, what freedom really is, they will be ignorant

how to attain it. Ignorance is the necessary sequence of their

poverty. Are the people poor? For the poor there are no museums, no

pictures, no elevating spheres of life, no grand music, no ennobling

poetry. All these phases are closed to them; and why? Because their

life is a constant struggle to live.... What is the use of preaching

to the masses if the masses do not understand the language in which

you talk to them? What is the use of your phrases to them when their

education compels them not to comprehend the words you say, nay, makes

them misunderstand you--for unfortunately _poverty has its education_,

and is in this case worse than mere ignorance. There is a miseducation

in poverty, which distorts the human mind, destroys self-reliant

energy, and is a most effectual barrier in the way of religious

liberty. Liberty, equality, fraternity, are words used very often

about the Republican institutions of the world; but you can never have

liberty, equality, and fraternity as long as there is poverty dividing

one class from another."

These words have been echoed since by Socialists and others who

represent Bradlaugh as a "Manchester" politician; and who either evade

the question of the birth-rate, or deny that it is of any account.

Their argument takes two main forms: (1) That to urge prudence on

the poor is useless, since they will not listen; while the better

workers who do listen are "sterilised;" (2) that there would be

no over-population if only wealth were properly distributed. Both

arguments are fallacious; the first proceeding upon ignorance of the

facts, and the desire to shirk a troublesome question; the second

upon non-comprehension of the law of population. In the first case,

the objector first implies that it _might_ be good to limit families

if only people could be got to do so, and then proceeds to say that

the limiting of families is harmful when practised. Both of these

conflicting views are erroneous in fact. It is _not_ difficult to make

the majority of poor men and women listen to reason on the subject;

with those who say it is, the wish is father to the thought, in that

they do not want to try to give the requisite knowledge. Thousands of

poor women ignorantly use the most disastrous means to limit their

fecundity; and extreme poverty often hampers them even where they

have the knowledge. A little money spent by the charitable in helping

the very poor in this way would obviate the need for endless alms to

relieve the misery which ignorant instinct multiplies. Nor is there

the least need to fear the "sterilising" of the more prudent, as the

limitation of the family has been unwarrantably termed. Small families

do not necessarily mean lessened total population. A man who has only

three children and rears them all healthfully, maintains the species

more efficiently than a man who has eight, loses six, and perforce

rears the two survivors badly, because what might have nourished two

or three well was for years spent in merely keeping more alive. The

extreme case of France, over which there has been so much superficial

talk in France and elsewhere, is no such portent as it is made out,

but is in part explicable by the stress of the influenza plague, which

heavily affected even the English birth-rate, and is in part a useful

reminder to French statesmen that they are pressing too heavily on

their country's resources, and need to mend their methods. Withal, the

misery in France is far less grinding and pervasive than the misery in

England.

As to the argument that it is not over-breeding, but bad distribution

that causes poverty, the answer is that both causes operate, but

that over-breeding can work misery under any system of distribution

whatever, and is a main support to bad distribution at present.

Some Malthusians have supposed that with a proper proportionment of

population to the resources of the time being, poverty would wholly

disappear. This is over-sanguine; but the case of the United States in

the first half of the century, when resources were still far ahead of

labour supply, gives abundant support to a more moderate claim. On the

other hand, unless the lesson of prudential restraint be learned, the

most thorough socialistic system of distribution will simply incur the

most complete ruin. People reason that if only the resources of the

world were properly utilised, all could be fed and housed comfortably.

That is quite true; but they forget that if there be no restraint, the

population of the world, being better placed than ever, will double at

least every twenty-five years, and will thus soon upset any possible

system of housing and feeding, and reduce the general condition to

toil and poverty all round. This is so obvious when put, that the

optimists are fain to fall back on a theory that population slackens

spontaneously under conditions of comfort. Mr George moves nimbly

between this theory and one which absolutely negates it. But all such

pleas resolve themselves into either an admission that the race _must

and will learn to practise prudential restraint_, which is a surrender

to Malthusianism, or an assumption of a pre-ordained beneficent harmony

in Nature, the old optimism in a new dress, or rather an old dress

"turned."

We come back to the common plea of all the antagonists of

Neo-Malthusianism--that there is no need to check over-breeding _at

present_--a position so crudely unreasonable, so irreconcilable with

any knowledge of the great facts of the case, that it is a mystery

how it can be taken up by candid and well-informed men. No amount of

demonstration that the world _might_ feed all its inhabitants can do

away with the dreadful fact that myriads of babes _are_ actually born

into the world every year only to die of the troubles made by poverty;

that these babes had much better not have been born; that their birth

might have been prevented; and that the survivors suffered from their

birth. That men can shut their eyes to these overwhelming facts, and

go on arguing, on an "if," that there is no need to restrain the

birth-rate "in the meantime," is one of the darkest anomalies of

political science.

Between the obstinacy of the opposing fallacy and the brutality of the

resistance of prejudice, many men who recognise the truth have yet

been wearied into holding their peace, in a pessimistic conviction

that mankind in the mass cannot be enlightened on the matter. Of that

attitude Bradlaugh was to the last incapable, though he had more cause

than most men to know how tremendous were the odds in the struggle.

Later generations will find it hard to credit the facts. A policy which

on the face of the case could only be motived by public spirit and zeal

for the truth was met by the vilest aspersions, the most malignant

imputation of the most preposterously bad intentions. Personal vice was

freely charged in explanation of an action which no vicious man would

have had the self-denial to undertake. It is the bare truth to say

that for many years a main part of the work of the Christian Evidence

Society in England has been to employ hirelings to charge Secularism

with the promotion of sexual vice--this on the strength partly of

Bradlaugh's work for Neo-Malthusianism, and partly of the vogue of the

anonymous work entitled "The Elements of Social Science," in which

the arguments for family limitation are combined with a perfectly

well-intentioned argument for sexual freedom as against celibacy and

prostitution, the evils of which are not only exposed, but provided

against in the book by careful medical instruction. Of this book, as we

have seen, while honouring the moral courage and absolute benevolence

of the anonymous writer, Bradlaugh expressly disclaimed the more

advanced doctrines; but he has been saddled with them all the same, as

if his burden of unpopularity were not already heavy enough.

He had fit though few compensations. He lived to see the rightness of

his course more and more widely and openly admitted; and to see some

Freethinkers and others who had unworthily attacked him for it come

round and follow in his steps. And at his trial with Mrs Besant for

selling the Knowlton pamphlet in 1877 he was able to tell the jury of

higher sanctions than these. Mill in his "Autobiography," telling how

he was attacked for subscribing to Bradlaugh's election fund in 1868,

says of him:--

"He had the support of the working-classes; having heard him speak, I

knew him to be a man of ability, and he had proved that he was the

reverse of a demagogue, by placing himself in strong opposition to

the prevailing opinion of the democratic party on two such important

subjects as Malthusianism and Personal Representation. Men of this

sort, who, while sharing the democratic feelings of the working

classes, judged political questions for themselves, and had courage to

assert their individual convictions against popular opposition, were

needed, as it seemed to me, in Parliament."

It may here be added that Grote, who was a regular reader of the

_National Reformer_ and a Neo-Malthusian also, approved even more

strongly. The further fact, now established, that Mill was in his youth

actually prosecuted for distributing Neo-Malthusian literature, should

serve to check the malice of those persons, clerical and other, who

still divide Freethinkers into two classes--one of "irreproachable

morals," following Mill, the other of "loose and dissolute character,"

following Bradlaugh.

Some Neo-Malthusians have been charged, despite their rejection of

the _non-possumus_ of Malthus, with excluding all other reforms in

their advocacy of family limitation. If this charge was even valid,

it certainly was not against Bradlaugh. He might much more reasonably

be criticised for not keeping the population question to the front

in every discussion of main reforms than for unduly obtruding it, or

using it to discourage reforms made in disregard of it. After he had

thoroughly forced it on the public attention, he trusted more to the

quiet dissemination of educative literature on the subject, and the

enlistment of individual self-interest in the reform, than to the

political handling of it on the platform, where the insistence on it

seems still to arouse the resentment of many Socialists and others,

who can see no need for any reform save those they themselves propose,

and are particularly wroth at the suggestion that working men can

be in any degree accountable for their own troubles. The defence of

the Knowlton pamphlet, as has been shown in the foregoing pages, was

forced on Bradlaugh; and it was the more trying for him in that he was

always personally averse to the detailed discussion of sexual topics.

At the same time, it was impossible for him to submit to the stupid

suppression by the authorities of the only cheap literature that

gave to the poor the necessary knowledge for the limitation of their

families. He was bound to resist that by every principle he professed;

by his doctrine of freedom for the press and his doctrine of prudence

in the family. So resisting, he identified himself once for all with

the Neo-Malthusian doctrine in politics, though the resulting special

notoriety of the topic was thus the work of the prosecutors themselves,

who probably did more by their hostile act for the spread of popular

knowledge than Bradlaugh had before been able to do by his years of

advocacy.

How important was his introduction of the principle into politics can

only be realised by those who know how much the principle means; and

it is still in the stage of being vilified by the pious and contemned

by the superficial, in which latter class may be included a good many

Socialists. The former heap upon avowed Neo-Malthusians an abuse which

they withhold from eminent politicians who confess opinions that

imply Neo-Malthusianism or nothing. Mr John Morley, for instance,

has expressed his regret that "we,"--that is, the Liberal party in

general--shirk the population question so much; and Mr Leonard Courtney

has laid it down that we may as well build a house in disregard of

the law of gravitation as hope to make a community prosper without

regard to the law of population. The late Lord Derby spoke to similar

effect. Either, then, such politicians mean to urge, with Malthus,

that working-men shall postpone marriage until they have saved a good

deal of money--that is, till middle or late life--or they approve of

early marriage with conjugal prudence. That is the whole matter; for

the nature of the prudence is a quite subsidiary question, on which no

wise man or doctor will narrowly dogmatise. But nobody, not even the

_Times_, denounces or insults Mr Courtney or Mr Morley or the late Lord

Derby for saying what each of them has said. As usual, the man who says

explicitly what other men say implicitly is singled out for attack, not

on the score of taste, but on the score of the plain doctrine, however

put.

On the whole, however, the tone of the discussion improves from year

to year. In the "Knowlton" trial, the then Solicitor-General, Sir

Hardinge Giffard (now Lord Halsbury), after hearing abundant evidence

to show that the details made known in the pamphlet were just such as

were made known in a number of other current works never prosecuted,

though freely circulated by prominent booksellers; and after himself

expressly avowing that "the book, I think it may be said, is carefully

guarded from any vulgarity of expression"--nevertheless persisted

in coarsely describing it as "dirty and filthy." Yet he himself

was so gratuitously indecent in his own language that in a number

of passages it had to be paraphrased or expunged in the report. And

though the puzzle-headed jury "entirely exonerated the defendants

from any corrupt motives in publishing," they were "unanimously of

opinion that the book in question is calculated to deprave public

morals," and allowed their foreman to present a verdict of guilty

under the indictment. Probably no metropolitan jury would now come

"unanimously" to the degrading conclusion that to spread specific

physiological knowledge is to deprave public morals, even if the

members were the "average sensual men" who habitually circulate and

gloat upon lewd anecdotes, to say nothing of their acts. It is true

that the abominable imputations packed into the indictment of Bradlaugh

and Mrs Besant were repeated in the miserable prosecution[108] which

took place at Newcastle in 1892; and that the Recorder who tried

that case, Judge Digby Seymour, displayed gross prejudice at every

stage of the trial, finally vilifying such a perfectly well-meant and

well-done treatise as Dr Allbutt's "Wife's Handbook," and the old

"Fruits of Philosophy," as "two of the filthiest works that could be

circulated to debauch and demoralise the minds of the people." Odious

aspersions of this kind represent merely the fanaticism of ignorant

custom, and take no heed of the enormous harm which physiological

ignorance breeds. The Solicitor-General in the Knowlton trial flatly

refused to deal with any such considerations; and Judge Seymour

similarly would listen to no rational argument. But a decisive current

of public opinion now begins to set the other way. Even a number of

clergymen now admit the frightful evils of over-breeding, and are thus

at least in part disentitled to cry out against rational prudence.

The Newcastle prosecution, moreover, was strongly condemned in the

local press; the accused was liberated; and at a public indignation

meeting one speaker declared, with applause, that "the verdict of

Judge Digby Seymour was an insult and a libel upon their English

manners." And though a Neo-Malthusian student was heavily fined[109]

in London in the previous year for circulating information in a

slightly irregular manner, the language of the counsel for the

Crown, who declared that "_the only check against immorality in this

country is the fear of pregnancy_," excited general indignation, as

did the conduct of the magistrate in ruling that decent language was

"obscene." This prosecution, too, was repented of; and the most direct

journalistic challenge afterwards failed to bring on any prosecution of

Neo-Malthusian doctrine as such.

[Footnote 108: Of Henry Loader, a professed Christian.]

[Footnote 109: He was fined £40, while two brothel-keepers were fined

only £5 each in the same week.]

Even the comparatively reasonable attitude of Sir Alexander Cockburn

in the "Knowlton" trial would not now recommend itself at all points

to educated people. In the hearing of the evidence he thought fit

to suggest that only "strong-minded ladies" could acquire medical

knowledge without becoming "less pure-minded." Nor would any thoughtful

people now agree with him and the Solicitor-General that "no better

tribunal can be found in the world to judge of such a question as this

than the average sound sense and enlightened judgment which is to be

found in English society." These flights of declamation on the Bench

are part of the general cant of English society, which can decorously

endorse the moral reflections of a judge whose own life is the subject

of chronic and much-relished scandal. But Cockburn at least put a

new obstacle in the way of legal molestation of honest propaganda

by expressing his agreement with the Malthusian doctrine as to

over-population; and the later judgment of Judge Windeyer in Victoria,

vindicating Mrs Besant's "Law of Population" when it was prosecuted

there, marks the turn of the legal tide.

§3.

The constructive policy which Bradlaugh joined with his Neo-Malthusian

doctrine had for its main item the radical reform of the land laws.

He was thus in practical harmony with those individualists who except

the land from the operation of the individualist principle, though he

did not declare like them for land nationalisation. Nationalisation he

considered too vast and difficult a transaction in the present state

of political evolution; but progressive interference with the land

monopoly he held to be as practicable as it is necessary. Property in

land, he held with Mill, "is only valid in so far as the proprietor

of the land is its improver; when private property in land is not

expedient it is unjust." And the control of the land, in his opinion,

must become the subject of a great and decisive struggle between the

people and the landowning class, who may or may not be aided by the

rest of the capitalist class. On this subject he felt no less strongly,

though he always spoke with more restraint, than do Socialists with

regard to capitalism pure and simple.

"It is for the use of air, moisture, and heat," he puts it, "for the

varied natural forces, that the cultivator pays; and the receiver

talks of the rights of property. We shall have for the future to

talk in this country of the rights of life--rights which must be

recognised, even if the recognition involves the utter abolition of

the present landed aristocracy."[110]

[Footnote 110: Pamphlet on "The Land, the People, and the Coming

Struggle," fourth ed., p. 8.]

And he could say of the landed class, what can hardly be said of the

labour-employing class in the main, that they had stood in the way of

every reform:

"The great rent-takers have been the opponents of progress; they

have hindered reform; they kept the taxes on knowledge; they passed

combination laws; they enacted long Parliaments; they made the

machinery of Parliamentary election costly and complicated, so as

to bar out the people. They have prevented education, and then have

sneered at the masses for their ignorance. All progress in the

producing power of labour has added to the value of land; and yet the

landowner, who has often stood worse than idly by while the land has

increased in value, now talks of the labourer as of the lower herd

which must be checked and restrained."

To carry out in legislation the principle of the common interest in

the land was accordingly one of his main aims; and at the time when

his illegal exclusion from Parliament forced him to concentrate all

his energies in the struggle for bare political life, he had gone

far to give effect to it. Early in 1880 he took the leading part in

establishing the Land Law Reform League, of which the formulated

objects were:--

"1. In case of intestacies, the same law to govern the distribution of

real and personal property. This would destroy primogeniture, but to

be useful would need to be followed by some limitation of the power of

devise, say as in France.

"2. Abolition of the right to settle or entail for non-existing lives.

It would be far better to abolish, all life estates ...

"3. Transfer of land to be made as cheap and easy as the transfer

of a ship. Security to be ensured by compulsory registration of all

dealings with land ...

"4. Abolition of all preferential rights of landlords over other

creditors....

"5. Abolition of the Game Laws.

"6. Compulsory cultivation of all lands now uncultivated, and not

devoted to public purposes, which are cultivable with profit. That is,

make it a misdemeanour to hold cultivable lands in an uncultivated

state. The penalty on conviction to be dispossession, but with payment

to dispossessed landowners of say twenty years' purchase of the

average annual value of the land for the seven years prior to the

prosecution. The payment to be by bonds of the State bearing the same

interest as the Consolidated Debt, and payable to bearer. The land to

be State property, and to be let to actual tenant cultivators on terms

of tenancy ... longer or shorter according to the improvement made in

the estate. The amount paid as rent to the State to be applied to the

payment of the interest and to form a sinking fund for the liquidation

of the principal.

"7. Security to the tenant-cultivator for improvements.

"8. Re-valuation of lands for the more equitable imposition of the

land-tax.

"9. Land-tax to be levied on a scale so graduated as to press most

heavily on excessively large holdings.

"10. One and the same land law for Great Britain and Ireland."

Within a few months this League, numbering among its Vice-Presidents

four clergymen, two of them belonging to the State Church, had

established a number of strong branches, enrolled members, and

affiliated societies representing many thousands more, thus attracting

an amount of notice in the press which promised important results. An

illustration of the effect produced may be seen in a letter which Mr

Ruskin thought worthy of insertion in _Fors Clavigera_:--

"May I take an advantage of this note, and call your attention to a

fact of much importance to Englishmen? and it is this. On reference

to some Freethought papers--notably the _National Reformer_--I find

a movement on foot amongst the Atheists, vigorous and full of life,

for the alteration of the Land Laws in our much-loved country. It is

a movement of much moment, and likely to lead to great results. The

first great move on the part of Charles Bradlaugh, the premier in the

matter, is the calling of a conference to discuss the whole question.

The meeting is to be attended by all the National Secular Society's

branches throughout the empire; representatives of nearly every

Reform Association in England, Scotland, and Ireland; deputations

from banded bodies of workmen, colliers, etc.--such as the important

band of Durham miners--Trade Unionists, and, in fact, a most mighty

representative conference will be gathered together. I am, for many

reasons, grieved and shocked to find the cry for Reform coming with

_such a heading_ to the front. Where are our statesmen--_our clergy_?

The terrible crying evils of our land system are coming to the front

in our politics without the help of the so-called upper classes; nay,

with a deadly hatred of any disturbance in that direction, our very

clergy are taking up arms against the popular cry.

"Only a week ago I was spending a few days with a farmer near Chester,

and learned to my sorrow and dismay that the Dean and Chapter of

that city, who own most of the farms, etc., in the district where

my friend resides, refuse now--and only _now_--to accept other than

_yearly_ tenants for these farms; have raised all the rents to an

exorbitant pitch, and only allow the land to be sown with wheat, oats,

or whatever else in seed, etc., on a personal inspection by their

agent. The consequences of all this is that poverty is prevailing to

an alarming extent; the workers all the bitter, hard toil; the clergy,

one may say, _all_ the profits. It is terrible, heart-breaking; I

never longed so much for heart-searching, vivid eloquence, so that I

might move men with an irresistible tongue to do the right."

It is vain now to guess what the movement might have done if Bradlaugh,

who was its main force, had been left free to carry it on continuously.

But, on the one hand, his overwhelming contest with the House of

Commons forced him to put aside an undertaking which depended so much

on a seat in that House; and on the other hand, to say nothing of the

precedence inevitably given to the Irish land question in Parliament,

it cannot be questioned that the fall in agricultural land values

took much of the wind out of the sails of English land reformers. The

phenomenon of land going out of cultivation put a new face on the

dispute. When Bradlaugh at length got his seat, he at once showed his

continued grasp of the problem by introducing a Bill for the Compulsory

Cultivation of Waste Land, the principle of which was, that wherever

land of more than one hundred acres lay uncultivated, and not used for

public pleasure,[111] while cultivable with profit by a cultivator

paying no rent, or a smaller rent than the landlord held necessary

to make it worth his while to lease, the Commissioners of Woods and

Forests should be empowered to take possession of such land and offer

it for tenancy. The keeping of the land uncultivated was to be a

misdemeanour; but the dispossessed owner was to receive in compensation

an annual payment for twenty-five years of a sum representing the

average annual value of the land during the fourteen years prior

to his dispossession, whatever that might be. The justification

given by Bradlaugh for making it a misdemeanour to hold land idle

was that already it was a misdemeanour for a labourer to live as an

idle vagrant, and that the law insisted on his utilising his labour

power. If labour, then _a fortiori_ land. In introducing this measure

Bradlaugh emphatically maintained that if the land would not yield

the "three profits" of Lord Beaconsfield's formula, it ought not to

be allowed to be kept idle and useless by the landlord. So long as a

cultivator could make _his_ profit, the State was bound to give him

the opportunity. Needless to say, the Bill was violently denounced by

the Conservative press. The _Times_ talked of "downright plunder."

The _Spectator_ was especially indignant on the score that "great

properties in the home counties, _kept waste in the hope that London

will build on them_, would be confiscated"; and that and other journals

held it a sufficient objection that in cases where land had been worth

nothing the landlord would get nothing. Many Liberal members further

objected that a Bill of such importance ought not to be introduced

by a private member; and generally there was more hostility than

help. On its discussion in the House (April 1886) Bradlaugh agreed to

withdraw the Bill on the ground that its machinery was insufficient,

he having come to the opinion that provision should be made for the

lending of money to moneyless men to enable them to cultivate on

their own behalf. In 1887, still seeing no hope of carrying a Bill,

he took the course of moving a resolution on the motion for going

into Committee of Supply, reaffirming the principle that "the right

of ownership carries with it the duty of cultivation," and proposing

to empower the "local authorities" to act as in the Bill of 1886 he

had proposed to make the Commissioners of Woods and Forests act. This

time he had considerable support, his resolution getting 101 votes, to

175 against. Not one of the front bench Liberals voted; but the Irish

Home Rulers did so in considerable force, making some amends for

old hostility.[112] Again, in 1888, he moved a modified resolution,

proposing to empower local authorities to purchase compulsorily waste

lands at the "capital agricultural value." This time, some hours having

been lost by a Scotch motion for the adjournment of the House on a

point affecting crofters, the discussion came to nothing, the House

being counted out while it was in process. Those who were behind the

scenes may be able to give the explanation of the apathy of the Liberal

and Radical members generally. The passing of an Allotments Act by the

Conservative Government may have had something to do with it. Be that

as it may, Bradlaugh again in March 1889 gave notice of a resolution

on the subject, this time proposing to give local authorities power to

levy a "waste and vacant land rate," or in the alternative, to acquire

the land by payment either "for a limited term of an annual sum not

exceeding the then average net annual actual produce," or of a sum

representing the capital agricultural value. This resolution, however,

never came to discussion. He again put it down in 1890, immediately

after his return from India, but again it failed to reach discussion.

In 1891 his work was over.

[Footnote 111: This stipulation was often ignored, and he was accused

of wanting to parcel out Hyde Park in allotments.]

[Footnote 112: For the details of the case in favour of compulsory

cultivation of land, see Bradlaugh's pamphlet on the subject, published

1887.]

It will be seen that his land policy was more advanced than any that

has yet been put in force by the Liberal party, though the legislation

of 1894 has advanced considerably towards the adoption of his principle

of compulsion. To that principle later legislators must inevitably

come; and as regards land not utilised it has irresistible force. The

proper answer to the demands of landlords for protection against the

import of cheap corn from land paying no rent in America, is that when

land goes out of cultivation here owing to such competition making

it fail to yield its old rent, or three profits, the opportunity of

cultivating it should pass to the State, which may fitly try the

experiment of placing on such land the labourers who are driven to

swell the crowd of unemployed in the towns. But this answer has never

yet been effectively made in politics.[113] The doctrine of the

nation's ownership of its land needs apparently to be asserted to-day

more emphatically than ever.

[Footnote 113: It has lately been advanced by a "Unionist" politician,

Mr T. W. Russell, in the _New Review_.]

Asserting it as he did, Bradlaugh represented a midway position between

out-and-out Socialism and out-and-out Individualism. Time will show

whether it was on the line to be taken by progressive reform. What

is clear is that if energetically adopted it may soon lead to the

complete overthrow of that land system which is the foundation of the

reactionary party politics of this country. In his pamphlet on "The

Land, the People, and the Coming Struggle," Bradlaugh put very clearly

the social ideal he had in view. "The enormous estates of the few

landed proprietors," he declared, "must not only be prevented from

growing larger, they must be broken up. At their own instance, and

gradually, if they will meet us with even a semblance of fairness, for

the poor and hungry cannot well afford to fight; but at our instance,

and rapidly, if they obstinately refuse all legislation." To this

end he proposed, as we have seen, re-valuation of all lands, and a

graduated land-tax, to press most heavily on the largest holdings. The

Budget of 1894, although stopping short of graduation of the annual

taxes, has made the first step towards them by graduating the death

duties; and the further steps are probably not far off. The broad

political problem of the future is the control of wealth distribution,

to the end of making the rendering of services a condition of the

enjoyment of services for all able-bodied persons; and it seems fairly

clear that the easiest of the various possible main steps towards

that consummation are the restriction of private property in land and

the indirect or direct absorption of "economic rent" by the State,

such adaptations being to the socialisation of other means of wealth

production as the simple to the complex. And while Bradlaugh, as has

been said, stipulated for gradual action even in the regulation of the

land, he never refused to contemplate the nationalisation of its rent

as an ultimate ideal.

§ 4.

It may now be easily inferred how Bradlaugh came to feel for the

popular Socialism of the day a mixture of distrust and aversion. It

was for him a flying off at a tangent from the right spiral line of

progress. He had counted on seeing the slowly-won political power of

the mass of the people turned to the enforcement of fundamental reforms

in taxation and land-tenure, so as to better the life-conditions of

the people in the mass; and he had trusted to a gradual learning of

the lesson of family prudence, with the result of an immense saving

of friction, waste, and misery. When he had got to the front of the

political struggle, the needed reforms were still nearly all to

make; and the great lesson of conjugal prudence was only beginning

to be learned on a large scale. What was wanted, to his mind, was

a combination of energy with patience. He had no belief in the

possibility of raising the lot of vast masses of people to a high level

suddenly by violent legislation for the direct transfer of all property

from the "haves" to the "have-nots": he knew how enormously difficult

it was to effect even the modifying measures for which he was working.

But he believed that with persistent toil and good sense it might so be

carried out that the life of the people should in the next generation

be greatly improved, and the stress of their life materially lessened.

Just at this stage, however, he saw the struggling people suddenly and

vociferously appealed to by teachers who taught the uselessness of all

gradual action; the futility of all preceding parliamentary effort;

the impossibility of any improvement so long as private property

in any of the means of production subsisted; the limitation of the

alternatives to the whole loaf or no bread; the necessity of subjecting

all industrial action whatever to collective control at one sweep; in a

word, the absolute necessity of effecting at a stroke, by violence if

need be, such a social and moral revolution as the world had never yet

seen. Already the folly of all this is recognised by many even of those

who resent Bradlaugh's popular exposure of it. Within ten years there

has been developed in England a progressive Socialism which repudiates

violence, substitutes evolution for revolution, proposes to utilise

all the existing political machinery, is glad of gradual advance, is

content to urge forward Radicalism, and modifies mathematical politics

by biological conceptions. But Bradlaugh had to bear the brunt of the

anger not only of the heated crowd who had shouted for the impossible,

but of the new sentimental journalists who had patronised them.

First he had been constantly and violently abused, in the early days

of his Parliamentary struggle, as being himself a Socialist, by

people who knew nothing whatever about his life and doctrine; and his

alleged Socialism was one of the pretexts on which some opposed his

entry into the House of Commons. The nobleman who then represented the

historic name of Percy took that line. A fair sample of the current

tone on the subject among the ignorant rich is supplied by their

votes _vates sanctissima_, the lady novelist "Ouida," in a letter

to the _Fortnightly Review_,[114] in which she discussed the class

politics of Italy. "It is the towns," she explained, "which are the

centres of eagerness for unconsidered war, and the foolish credulity

of bombastic Radicalism;" and she went on in her best-informed manner

to particularise "the 'educated' cad of the Turin or Florence streets,

who has heard just enough of Fourier and Bradlaugh to think that

society ought to maintain at ease his ugly idleness." The idleness

which felt sure of its beauty was naturally resentful. All the while,

Bradlaugh was at sharp strife with the Socialists of the moment; and

he soon came to be applauded for his course in this matter by the

same precious upper-class opinion which had just imputed to him the

views he assailed, while new assailants vituperated him as a traitor

to principles he had never accepted. It is largely to his destructive

criticism that the undefined fashionable Socialism of the present hour

owes its comparative rationality;[115] but there is small thought of

acknowledging the service.

[Footnote 114: November 1881, p. 842.]

[Footnote 115: His longer criticisms of Socialism make a fair volume.

They are: (1) Socialism; For and Against: written debate with Mrs

Besant, 1887; (2) Will Socialism benefit the English People? debate

with Mr Hyndman, 1883; (3) Written debate with Mr Belfort Bax, under

same title; (4) "Socialism; its Fallacies and Dangers," article in

_North American Review_, January 1887, reprinted as a pamphlet;

Pamphlet, "Some objections to Socialism," 1884. See also his articles

and debate on the "Eight Hours Question," and his lecture on "Capital

and Labour."]

Certainly he had struck hard, and this not merely because he was

iniquitously and ferociously attacked by Socialists generally.[116]

He saw the new doctrine appealing to and applauded by, not the

clear-headed and self-controlled workers, but the neurotic, the noisy,

the passionate, the riotous. Instead of meetings of men at once

earnest and orderly, such as he had gathered and addressed for so many

years, meetings at which debate could go on without disorder, he saw

gatherings of wildly excited men, who could not listen to opposition,

who could not sit still in their seats when their view were countered,

and who turned a public debate into a public disturbance. Significantly

enough, the one town in which the Socialist party, even when pretty

numerous, can be trusted to give an opponent a fair hearing, is

Northampton, where for so many years he disciplined the workers to

orderly activity, and to self-control under extreme provocation. No

cause ever needed such discipline more than that of Socialism. It is

quite reasonable to plead for consideration for men whose life is hard,

and who see idlers at their ease; but extenuating circumstances do

not affect the stream of tendency; and no amount of sympathy with the

luckless can make up for want of judgment in those who undertake to

lead them. And to talk, as so many of the Socialist talkers did a dozen

or less years ago, of resorting to physical force, to revolutionise

society, was only to expose the luckless to new disaster.

[Footnote 116: I happened to be standing by when, at a Freethought

Conference, the late Dr Cæsar de Pæpe, a leading Belgian Socialist and

Freethinker, personally and fraternally remonstrated with Bradlaugh on

his opposition to Socialism. He vehemently answered that he had found

the English Socialists among the most unscrupulous of his enemies, they

having not only lied about him freely, but put in his mouth all sorts

of things he had never said or thought.]

Whether all Bradlaugh's argumentation against Socialist theory will

hold good is another question. It is probable that the extreme

statements of Socialist doctrine with which he had to deal led him

latterly to define his Individualism at times more sharply than before.

Not many years before his death he declined to dub himself either

Individualist or Socialist. He sought to legislate for an evolving

society, conditioned by all sorts of anomalous survivals; and he must

prescribe for each juncture or trouble in view of all the facts of the

case. As he put it in his pamphlet on "Parliament and the Poor":--

"All progressive legislation in this country is necessarily

compromise. It is not possible to legislate on hard and fast lines of

principle alone. A state of things has grown up through generations

which can only be gradually changed. The expedient has to be

considered in all lawmaking. Legal interpretations of right have

received judicial sanction, which have become so much part of our

general political and social system that sudden reversal would be

attended often with the gravest mischief. Temporary concessions have

usually to be made on the one side, to win consent from the other, to

a sure step in advance; but no compromise is final."

But the affirmation by Socialists of principles which seemed to make

an end of self-reliance and self-determination led him to offer

definitions of the sphere of Government; and while his concrete

decisions--as in the case of the Eight Hours movement--will probably

be found to be in all cases sagacious, it may be that political science

will yet endorse action which he declined to contemplate. His practical

justification is that his Socialist adversaries always argued the

case _in vacuo_, and demanded the nationalisation of all the means

of production, and, by consequence, the State determination of all

destinies, at a time when not only is the public in the terms of the

case still largely predatory and anti-social in instinct, but the

Socialists themselves are divided by incurable animosities. Mr Hyndman

chose to debate with him on the issue, "Will Socialism benefit the

English People?"--"if resorted to here and now" being implied. Only

when it is asked, "Can we evolve up to Socialism?" will Bradlaugh's

rebuttal be got rid of.

What may perhaps be urged against him, as against land nationalisers

from Mill onwards, is that the theory which makes land the main matter

is partly undermined by the economic evolution in which agricultural

land values in this country have receded, the food supply being more

and more derived from abroad, in return for exported goods. On this

head, however, it may here suffice to answer that that is in all

likelihood a temporary phase; that in any case, English industry rests

on the coal supply, which is a matter of land in the economic sense;

and that a Socialism which thinks to maintain a forever increasing

population, on the basis of a mere national workshop system, is much

more short-sighted than the doctrine which makes the land the fulcrum

of all industrial movement.

There is just one criticism of Bradlaugh's politics which the present

writer will not undertake to meet, since it raises a point on which he

was driven to differ from him. It is the objection to the optimistic

assumption that the mass of the people can surmount the trouble of

chronic trade-depression by means of thrift. This was perhaps the one

touch of uncritical optimism in Bradlaugh's political system. He argued

that the workers could acquire all necessary capital for themselves

by simple saving. "You can earn it," he tells them, at the close of

his lecture on "Capital and Labour,"--"the Rothschilds' wealth, the

Overstones' wealth, the Barings' wealth--you, the millions, if you

are only loyal to yourselves and to one another, may put all this

into your own Savings Banks, and your own friendly societies, and

your own trades unions, within a dozen years. You accumulate it for

others: you can do it for yourselves." The answer to this is that the

capital in question depends for its continuance on the continuance of

industrial production, and of the demand for the product; whereas, if

the workers were to stint their consumption to the extent of saving

great masses of capital from wages, they would to that extent check

their total production, unless, that is, the other classes increase

their consumption to a balancing extent; which, however, they could not

conceivably do. Even if the birth-rate be so checked as to lessen the

nett population, the increasing power of machinery would so far balance

the lessened supply of labour that the tactic of parsimony on a large

scale would defeat itself. At present the successful savers are so in

virtue of the ill-luck of other investors and the non-saving of the

mass. Saving all round would neutralise itself, since the saving could

only be profitably invested in production to meet increasing demand,

whereas in the terms of the case there would be decreasing demand. It

is spending that keeps the machine going, not saving.