That goodly project, however, came to nothing, though in the view of

Justice Stephen most if not all of the writers and publishers named

were certainly open to conviction for blasphemy under the existing law.

It would appear that the spiritual interests of "cultivated families"

arouse less solicitude than do those of the poor, in matters religious

as well as Malthusian. Above all, none of the writers threatened, save

Mr John Morley, was likely to give the Tory party any chance of turning

his heresy to political advantage, and Mr Morley was already safe in

his seat, having taken the oath without demur and without opposition,

after editorially criticising Mr Bradlaugh for his willingness to take

it. Mr Morley had perhaps put himself right with the religious party by

applauding the prosecution of Foote and Ramsey--he who had expressly

justified the polemic of Voltaire.[174] A clergyman of the Church of

England, the Rev. Stewart Headlam, whose championship of the principle

of religious equality has all along been above all praise, wrote to Mr

Morley in his editorial capacity, protesting "as a Christian priest"

against a policy which made it "almost impossible for Christians to

meet Atheists on equal terms." "It seems," Mr Headlam began, "as

though you were one of those who say, 'There is no God, but it's a

family secret.'" The letter was suppressed. It is bare justice to cite

it here[175] as being perhaps the most telling protest made against

the blasphemy prosecutions, albeit written by a sincerely orthodox

clergyman.

[Footnote 174: To do Mr Morley justice, it should be acknowledged that

he unsaid his vindication in the same book.]

[Footnote 175: It was printed in the _National Reformer_ of 1st April

1883.]

The original case against Bradlaugh's co-defendants, Messrs Foote and

Ramsey, who had been already sentenced to imprisonment on the second

prosecution by Mr Justice North, came on before Lord Coleridge and

a special jury on 24th April. The judge treated the prisoners with

signal consideration and courtesy; and when the prosecuting counsel,

Mr Moloney, persisted in putting a question to which Lord Coleridge

had objected, his lordship indignantly asked, "Why cannot this case

be conducted like any other case? It seems all of a piece with the

learned counsel inspecting a man's bank-book." The accused defended

themselves, Mr Foote making a particularly able speech, on which the

judge, in his summing-up, repeatedly complimented him. That summing-up

(delivered on the 25th) was in its way a masterly performance, marking

the judge as the most admirably persuasive of pleaders. Deeply averse

to all punishment of opinion, he showed the jury that the blasphemy

law, as interpreted by past judges, was not nearly so outrageous as had

been supposed; and the definition of "the late Mr Starkie," of which

a scanty quotation had been given by the prosecution, he showed to be

much less illiberal than it had been understood to be, though nothing

could make it out to be a precise or practical formulation of law. As

in the previous trial, he demolished the absurd plea that "Christianity

is part of the law of the land," by the _reductio ad absurdum_ that

the marriage law and the monarchy are part of the law of the land, but

are yet open to being argued against--at least in all modern opinion.

As, however, no interpretation could do away with the hard facts of

the blasphemy laws, and the accused had unfortunately put their heresy

at times with extreme pictorial crudeness, his lordship could not

definitely charge the jury that no blasphemy had been committed in law.

He admitted that the objection against their practice on the score of

violence would apply to some passages read by Mr Foote from prominent

modern writers, which were new to him; but while the law stood as it

was, that was no defence for Mr Foote, as the writers in question

would be equally open to indictment. The jury, thus unavoidably left

in doubt, disagreed. The prosecution, acting judiciously for the first

time, took the course of entering a _nolle prosequi_, and the case

dropped, but not without the Lord Chief Justice having to point out

that the petition grossly misrepresented him as having pronounced the

prosecution "unadvisable," which he had carefully abstained from doing.

Unluckily, the dropping of this case did not affect the sentence

passed by Justice North, and the then Home Secretary, Sir William

Harcourt, declined to mitigate the punishment, on the score of the

offensiveness of one of the incriminated woodcuts, which he called "an

obscene libel," though the charge was one of blasphemy. Some Liberal

journals indignantly protested; but the Liberal leaders felt they

must show no consideration to blasphemy, though even the _Spectator_

censured them for their timidity.

§19.

While the decisive trials were yet in the future, Bradlaugh had

never slackened his energetic action on the political side of the

fight. The last move in the House had been taken on 18th July 1882,

when Mr Labouchere moved that Bradlaugh be appointed a member of the

Committee to consider the Agricultural Tenants' Compensation Bills.

The right of a member in Bradlaugh's position to serve on committees

had been established by the precedents of Alderman Salomons and Baron

Rothschild. The point was a curious one, and could not be got over

argumentatively, but of course the House could outvote the motion,

which it did by 120 to 35. Not till the next year was the campaign

indoors reopened.

On 15th February 1883, the day of the reassembling of Parliament,

a great demonstration was held in Trafalgar Square in support of

Bradlaugh's and Northampton's claim, about a thousand delegates

attending from some four hundred Radical associations of provincial

towns. At first some of the railway companies were understood to be

willing to run cheap excursion trains, but that concession was of

course violently opposed, and at a meeting of representatives of

the companies held in the Railway Clearing House on 29th January

a resolution was carried by a majority of votes, binding all the

companies to give no special facilities whatever. An attempt to get the

use of the Floral Hall, Covent Garden, for the meeting was defeated

by the veto of the Duke of Bedford's agent, though the Directors

were willing to grant it; and no other sufficiently large hall was

available for the date. The meeting, which would have been several

times larger had the railway companies given the desired special

trains, was nevertheless a great success, the square being densely

packed, despite bad weather; and despite some attempts at rioting by

hired roughs, there was almost perfect order throughout. The _Pall

Mall Gazette_ had deprecated the meeting as held in an illegal place,

though for a perfectly legal purpose. This was a misconstruction of

the Act 57th Geo. III. cap. 19, sec. 23, which prohibited meetings

within a mile of Parliament House for the purpose of petitioning the

Crown or Parliament "for alteration of matters in Church or State." As

there was no petition under consideration, the meeting was perfectly

legal. Other papers went further, the _Daily Telegraph_ applauding

the railway companies for refusing to "start trains in order to bring

up country roughs;" and generally it must be recorded that some of

the leading Liberal journals discouraged the whole procedure. The

_Daily News_ and _Daily Chronicle_ even suppressed resolutions sent

them in support of Bradlaugh's claim from provincial clubs before the

demonstration--such resolutions being part of the manifold machinery

of preparation for a great public demonstration; and the Tory papers

as a rule suppressed all reports tending to show the support given

to Bradlaugh in the country. Other forms of boycotting were freely

employed. In the cathedral town of Peterborough a debating society set

up by the local Young Men's Christian Association was deprived of the

use of the Association's rooms because it carried a motion in favour

of Bradlaugh's right to sit and vote. This episode typified hundreds.

The most skilful device employed, perhaps, was the issue of a forged

circular, purporting to come from Bradlaugh, calling on "all Atheists,

as well as Socialists," to "assemble in their thousands round the House

of Commons," and show that "the Atheists of this country have a right

to be represented" in Parliament.[176] Newspapers which had no space

for genuine news about Bradlaugh gave prominence to this.

[Footnote 176: Cited in _National Reformer_, 18th February, p. 101.]

As the meeting of Parliament drew near, expectation naturally rose high

on both sides. The sentiment of many Tories may be presumed to have

been expressed by Lord Newark, son of Earl Manvers, when at the annual

dinner of the Nottinghamshire Agricultural Society he was ruffianly

enough to say:

"He supposed that Mr Bradlaugh meant to make himself objectionable as

usual. He heard from an honourable member who sat near him[177] that

he thought of going with a big stick, and he (Lord Newark) hoped that

if he came within reach of Mr Bradlaugh he would make use of it."

[Footnote 177: The hon. members were: Lord Galway, Messrs Foljambe and

Nicholson, and Colonel Seely.]

The stick, however, was not on exhibition at the House of Commons.

Bradlaugh's course was to send to the Speaker a letter stating the

then position of matters, in view of the action of the law courts; and

stating that he proposed to present himself as before. This letter

was read to the House before any other business was taken. On Mr

Labouchere asking the Government what course they meant to take, Lord

Hartington at once answered that on the following night they would move

for leave to bring in an Affirmation Bill. Sir Richard Cross, on the

Conservative side, at once announced that he would oppose the Bill, and

his statement was loudly cheered. At this stage Inspector Denning asked

Bradlaugh to leave the House and reassure the multitude outside, who

were beginning to fancy they might be "ill-using him inside."

On 20th February the motion for leave was made, when Sir Henry Drummond

Wolff was understood to express himself with ironical approbation,

while Mr Chaplin opposed, and Northcote explained that he should vote

against the second reading. The motion was carried by 184 votes to 53,

most of the Irish party voting in the minority. Not till 23d April did

the Bill reach its second reading; and in the meantime a desperate

effort was made by the entire Tory party to arouse feeling against the

Bill. In the previous session the petitions in Bradlaugh's favour had

been signed by 275,000 persons, and those against him by only 65,000,

many of these being children. The leeway was now made up. The machinery

of the Anglican and Catholic Churches was worked to the utmost to beat

up petitions; schools were swept wholesale for signatures, not only

in England but abroad;[178] and large employers of labour were got to

procure the signatures of employees _en masse_, reluctant workers being

not obscurely threatened with the consequences of refusal. By these

means half a million signatures were got up by the 23rd of April, the

great majority being those of school-children and coerced employees.

_Tantum religio_----. The Tory press likewise put its best foot

foremost. In the _St James's Gazette_ of 22nd February, Mr Greenwood

made an abominable attack on Bradlaugh, the foulest of many foul

blows, describing him as "a preacher of certain theories of the sexual

relation which, in the opinion of the great majority of Englishmen, are

not only immoral but filthy," going on to speak of him as having long

been known as the publisher of an obscene tract, and representing him

as an advocate of "Free Love, and sundry other doctrines and practices

which benefit greatly by the impossibility of referring to them

distinctly among decent people." The pamphlet formerly put together by

Varley, largely consisting of matter Bradlaugh never wrote, falsified

even at that, and partly of passages from him, wrested from their

context and falsified in application, was circulated more widely than

ever. Many members of Parliament repeated the palpable falsehood that

Bradlaugh had been "declared by the House of Commons and the courts of

law incapable of sitting in Parliament;" and Mr H. S. Northcote, son of

Sir Stafford, in addition to making this statement to his constituents

at Exeter, told them that "when Mr Bradlaugh led a mob of unwashed

ruffians down to Parliament Yard" the Government introduced their Bill.

[Footnote 178: A barrister wrote to Bradlaugh enclosing a letter from

his daughter, aged fifteen, at school at Frankfort, telling how the

English chaplain there called and asked all the English girls at the

school to sign a petition against the Affirmation Bill (_National

Reformer_, 15th April 1883).]

On the second reading, Sir Richard Cross opened the opposition, and

began by making the statement that "it was a former Government whip,

Mr Adam, who first invited Mr Bradlaugh to go to Northampton"--the

grossest form ever given to that particular untruth. He was seconded

by Mr M'Cullagh Torrens, a nominal Liberal, who in his work on

"Empire in Asia" had affected a high esteem for the principle of

religious toleration--in other countries. The Bill, he said, tended

"to begin the abjuring of all responsibilities to heaven." Mr W.

E. Baxter, following, declared that "not only had Atheists been

members of Parliament, but they had sat on the Treasury Bench"--and a

member called out "And sit!" Giffard, seeking his revenge at once on

Bradlaugh and Lord Coleridge, "repeated without the smallest fear of

contradiction that Christianity was a part of the common law of the

kingdom." Mr Illingworth happening to speak of "recreant members of the

Jewish community," Baron de Worms rose to order, and the Speaker ruled

the term "out of order." None of the epithets directed at the Atheist

had struck him in that light.

The debate was thrice adjourned. On 26th April Sir H. D. Wolff took

it upon him to accuse Lord Chancellor Selborne of using his position

to help his political party; and Lord R. Churchill, in a later speech,

said the same thing of Lord Coleridge. On the Liberal side, Gladstone

made the greatest speech delivered by him during the whole controversy.

At first he was elaborate and deprecatory, but gradually he rose to

warmth and cogency. "Do you suppose," he asked--

"Do you suppose that we are ignorant that in every contested election

which has happened since the case of Mr Bradlaugh came up you have

gained votes and we have lost them? (Opposition cheers and counter

cheers.) _You_ are perfectly aware of it. We are not less aware of

it. But if you are perfectly aware of it, is not some credit to be

given to us--we giving you the same under circumstances rather more

difficult--for presumptive integrity and purity of motive?"

It was a naïve and a vain appeal, but the speech was none the less

fine. The most powerful part of its argument was the demonstration that

those who consented to drop the Christian element from the oath and

held by the Theistic were treating Christianity, as such, as a thing

that could be dispensed with.

"I am not willing, sir, that Christianity--if the appeal is to be made

to us as a Christian legislature--shall stand in any rank lower than

that which is indispensable." He would not accept bare Theism as the

main thing. "The adoption of such a proposition as that--and it is at

the very root of your contention--seems to me in the highest degree

disparaging to the Christian faith."

And then, contending that a bare belief in a remote and abstract Deity

could exist with a complete disbelief in that Deity's having any

relation with men, he rolled out "the noble and majestic lines, for

such they are, of the Latin poet:"--

"Omnis enim per se divom natura necesse'st

Immortali aevo summa cum pace fruatur

Semota ab nostris rebus sejunctaque longe;

Nam privata dolore omni, private periclis,

Ipsa suis pollens opibus, nil indiga nostri

Nec bene promeritis capitur neque tangitur ira."[179]

[Footnote 179: Lucretius, ii. 646-651. It was thought notable that

the orator did not allude to the kindred passage in his beloved Homer

(_Odyssey_, vi. 41), splendidly rendered by Lucretius (iii. 18-22),

and choicely paraphrased by Tennyson in his poem "Lucretius." The

best expression in English verse of the idea in the passage quoted by

Gladstone is again Tennyson's--the great passage a the close of the

"Lotos Eaters."]

There was no one to follow him up with a citation of the lines which

follow on these where they used to stand misplaced in the first book of

Lucretius' poem:--

"Humana ante oculos foede cum vita jaceret

In terris oppressa gravi sub religione;"

but some listeners there must have been who bethought them how

perfectly this long controversy had answered to the Roman's picture

of "life crushed to the earth under the weight of religion;" and they

may fitly have murmured "primum Graius homo" of the man whose long

battle was even then visibly tending to relieve them one day of the old

hypocrisy of adjuring the unknown God.

Touching his mother earth of classic verse, Gladstone drew new strength

of eloquence.

"The Deity exists, as those I must say magnificent words set forth,

in the remote, inaccessible recesses of which we know nothing,

but with us it has no dealing, with us it has no relation. I have

purposely gone back to ancient times, but I do not hesitate to say

that the specific evil or specific form of irreligion with which

in the educated society of this country you have to contend, and

with respect to which you ought to be on your guard, is not blank

Atheism. That is a rare opinion that is seldom met with; but what is

frequently met with are those forms of opinion which say that whatever

is beyond the visible scene, whatever there be beyond this short span

of life, you know, and can know, nothing of it. It is a visionary and

bootless undertaking to try to fathom it. That, sir, is the specific

mischief of the age; but that mischief of the age you do not attempt

to touch.... Whom do you seek to admit? You seek to admit Voltaire.

You would admit Voltaire, and that is a specimen of your liberality.

Voltaire was no taciturn unbeliever. He was the author of that phrase

which goes to the heart of every Christian, and of many a professor of

religion who is not a Christian--'_Ecrasez l'Infâme._' Voltaire would

not have had the slightest difficulty in taking your oath; and yet

that is the state of the law for which you are working up the country

to madness." (Loud ministerial cheers.)

Speeches followed varying between imbecility and commonplace; and

on the debate being again adjourned, it was re-opened (1st May) by

Churchill in a speech of characteristic scurrility.

"The personal supporters of the representative of Atheism," said

the noble Lord, "were the residuum, and the rabble, and the scum of

the population. The bulk of them were men to whom all restraint,

religious, moral, or legal, was odious and intolerable."

An effective reply to other parts of the speech was made by Mr

Labouchere, who incidentally made the startling revelation that to his

knowledge there were several members who had never taken the oath at

all, having signed the roll, but missed swearing in the scramble for

the Testaments. At length, on a third adjournment, the question came to

the vote. Northcote made an ignominious speech, in which he defended

himself on the point of having formerly urged that special legislation

was the right course for the Government to take. He admitted that

he had said so, but contended that saying so did not commit him to

voting for that course when taken. The positive part of the argument

was worthy of the negative. But bad as the pleading on the Tory side

was, it had with it a majority of votes. On the division there voted

only 289 for the second reading, and 292 against. Irish and renegade

Liberal votes had just turned the scale; and it was noted that in

the majority there voted several members too drunk to walk straight

without support.[180] The result was received with a positive frenzy of

delight by the Tories and their Home Rule allies, all alike shouting

that they had "beaten Bradlaugh." "The Irish have beaten Bradlaugh,"

was the cry of Mr Sexton. The Liberals who voted with the majority were

the three Hon. Fitzwilliams of Yorkshire, Sir Edward Watkin,[181] Dr

Lyons, Messrs Guest, Nicholson, and Torrens, and Mr Jerningham, a Roman

Catholic, who had owed his recent election for Berwick mainly to his

having promised to support Bradlaugh's claim to sit, and who all along

broke his word in the House.[182]

[Footnote 180: Bradlaugh later publicly specified Newdegate as having

been tipsy, "not for the first time;" and Newdegate, though denying the

charge, did not bring an action for libel.]

[Footnote 181: It should be said that Sir Edward Watkin is understood

to regret his action.]

[Footnote 182: Mr Jerningham defended himself by asserting that

Bradlaugh had written a "Comic History of Christ," which was one lie

more. On being corrected, he told another, saying that Bradlaugh

admitted having written the Introduction.]

Bradlaugh without hesitation took his usual course, with a difference.

He sent a letter to the Speaker, asking to be called to the table in

the usual way to take the oath, and, in the case of that course being

declined, to be heard at the bar. On 4th May he duly re-presented

himself at the bar, and the letter was read by the Speaker. Northcote

moved as usual that Bradlaugh be not allowed to swear; and Mr

Labouchere moved that he be heard at the bar, which being allowed, he

made his Fourth Speech at the Bar. It was comparatively brief, tersely

repeating the old pleas, and the old protest--

"I submit that any hindrance which is not prescribed by law is an act

which in itself is flagrantly wrong, whoever may commit it, and that

the mere fact that a majority of voices in one Chamber may prevent a

citizen from appealing to the law in no sense lessens the iniquity of

the illegal act, and that history will so judge it, whatever to-day

you may think it your right and your duty to do."

After disposing of the old falsehood that the late Liberal whip had

recommended him to the Northampton electors, he remarked:--

"I have always regarded the Liberal party as standing in the way of my

election, rather than as in any way helping my return. This, however,

I submit, was matter unworthy of this House. No such consideration has

ever entered at any time into the discussion of any other candidature.

I submit that a great House, which claims the powers of one of the

highest courts of these realms, should try to be judicial."

Again he exposed the persistent lie that he had "paraded his views,"

pointing out that even when, at official request, he named the statutes

under which he claimed to affirm, he did not in law profess Atheism,

since a Theist was legally incompetent to swear if he did not believe

in future rewards and punishments, and such Theists were only entitled

to affirm under the Acts under which he claimed. Again he protested

that he had never uttered his opinions in the House.

"Under great temptation I have refrained from saying a word which

could wound the feelings of the most religious, although I have heard

within these walls, within but a few hours, language used by one who

had declared his religion which I should have felt ashamed to use in

any decent assembly."

This referred to an exhibition by Callan, the Catholic henchman of

Cardinal Manning, who had repeatedly appeared in the House drunk, and

who, in the division of the 3rd, had used such "filthy and blasphemous"

language towards another Irish member who proposed to vote for

Bradlaugh, that he had to make a formal apology to prevent the matter

being raised. On 30th April, in the adjourned debate, another Irish

member, M'Coan, had read some of the false quotations compiled by

Varley, and, on being challenged, impudently asserted that Bradlaugh

had never repudiated them. A third Irish member, Mr O'Brien, had

observed that he "did not believe that any greater number of persons

favoured Mr Bradlaugh than would be content to go naked through the

streets." Yet another religious member, an English Tory, Mr Ritchie,

had declared that the Affirmation Bill would be "the triumph of Atheism

and Socialism," and further quoted to the House, as words used by

Bradlaugh, words which he had never used, and which were described in

the very document quoted as taken from a report for which he was not

responsible. The "filthy book," too, had been mentioned; and on this

Bradlaugh read the words of Lord Chief Justice Cockburn, hereinbefore

printed, with the exculpatory words of the jury. "But all these

things," he added, "although they were as true as they are false, give

you no right to stand between me and my seat." His peroration was

perfect:--

"I heard a strange phrase from a noble lord, that both sides had gone

too far to recede. The House honours me too much in putting me on

one side and itself on the other. The House, being strong, should be

generous. The strong can recede, the generous can give way; but the

constituents have a right to more than generosity--they have a right

to justice. (Cheers.) The law gives me my seat. In the name of the law

I ask for it. I regret that my personality overshadows the principles

involved in this great struggle; but I would ask those who have

touched my life, not knowing it, who have found for me vices which I

do not remember in the memory of my life, I would ask them whether all

can afford to cast the first stone--(cheers)--or whether, condemning

me for my unworthiness, they will as just judges vacate their own

seats, having deprived my constituents of their right here to mine."

(Loud cheers.)

It remained to discuss the closing step, as usual. Mr Labouchere moved

the previous question in a speech which pointedly raised the issue of

the actual presence of other Atheists in the House.

"Since Mr Bradlaugh has been re-elected--since you refused to allow

him to take the oath--it is well known by every member of this House

that a gentleman has been elected who is of great position in the

literary world; and every man who knows anything of English literature

knows perfectly well that that gentleman has avowed himself to be an

unbeliever in a superintending Providence as clearly as Professor

Huxley himself. ('Hear, hear.') I ask, is it not monstrous hypocrisy

to allow that hon. member to take the oath, and prevent Mr Bradlaugh

from taking it, because you assert that three years ago he had stated

within the precincts of this House that he was an Atheist?"

The member referred to was Mr John Morley, who, destined to be Mr

Gladstone's most trusted lieutenant, had listened to the Premier's

account of "the mischief of the age," but had taken no part in the

debate. His Atheism, or non-Theism, was as notorious as Bradlaugh's.

It had been zealously used against him by the Tories in his recent

election at Newcastle. The fact that he had "spelt 'God' with a small

'g'" through a whole book was known to the whole newspaper-reading

public; and the Tories would certainly have been glad enough to exclude

him if they could. But they knew all along that there were Atheists

on their own side; and Mr Morley's case could not be raised without

raising these. So the "profanation of the oath" was permitted without a

murmur by the party which had declared itself incapable of tolerating

such a thing; and the flagitious persecution of the avowed Atheist was

recommenced all the same.

To Mr Labouchere's charge of "monstrous hypocrisy" no answer was

attempted. Gladstone and Northcote with one consent ignored it. On a

division, though Gladstone supported Mr Labouchere's motion (which if

carried would have enabled Bradlaugh to take the oath), only 165 voted

for it, and 271 against.

§ 20.

Three years had now passed since Bradlaugh first sought to take the

seat to which he was alike morally and legally entitled--three years

of manifold exhausting and sorely burdensome strife, of iniquitous and

vile calumny, of lawless and shameful persecution, in part brutally

fanatical, in part dishonest and hypocritical in the lowest degree.

It had been made to embrace all who were closely connected with him.

First Mrs Besant was insultingly refused leave to use the garden of

the Royal Botanic Society for her studies, on the score that the

daughters of the Curator used it. Later (1883) the Misses Bradlaugh

were denied membership of the "Somerville" (Women's) Club on the score

that their names were sufficient objection. Yet later (2nd May 1883)

Mrs Besant and Miss Bradlaugh were refused admittance to the practical

Botany Class at University College, London. On applying by letter,

they were requested to present themselves, and then they were told in

person by the secretary and the "lady superintendent" that they could

not be admitted, because there was "some prejudice" against them. It

seemed as if nothing short of the personal insult would suffice the

officials concerned; but the Council[183] endorsed their action at its

meeting of 7th May, though the very purpose for which the College had

been founded was to dispense with religious qualifications. A memorial

requesting the Council to summon an extraordinary general meeting to

consider this action was signed by, among others, Professors Huxley,

Bain, and Frankland, and Dr E. B. Tylor; but on the meeting being held,

the medical graduates came in large numbers to support the action of

the Council, greatly outvoting the others. Only nine voted against. The

University College was thus committed to a course of ethical rivalry

with the House of Commons, outdoing that body, however, in declining

to assign any reason for its action. At the meeting Mr Justice Denman

took an active part in justifying the action of the Council, and it

went from him to the country that the excluded ladies had "refused

to comply with the rules of the College." This was pure fiction. Mrs

Besant described it at the time as a "cruel and malignant falsehood,

for we complied with every condition laid down to us." Informed of his

mis-statement, Mr Justice Denman made no correction. Later in the year

an attempt was made to deprive of his chair a Professor of Mathematics

in the South Wales University, Mr Lloyd Tanner, who was a member of the

National Secular Society, and had helped the movement in support of

Bradlaugh's claim. It was, however, defeated by a majority of votes.

[Footnote 183: The President was Lord Kimberley; the Treasurer Sir

Julian Goldsmid; and the Council included Lord Belper, Sir B. N. Ellis,

Sir A. Hobhouse, Lord Reay, and Sir George Young. I cannot ascertain

who were present, save that Sir A. Hobhouse was one.]

These endless acts of persecution, parodied as they were in a thousand

acts of less publicity, only roused the persecuted party to more

energetic action. The Freethought propaganda was carried further

than ever, and naturally did not grow more gentle. On the political

side, Bradlaugh set himself afresh to rouse the constituencies,

bating no jot of heart or hope. To his own constituents he offered

his resignation if they wished it, and once more they emphatically

refused. He accordingly issued one more "Appeal to the People,"

organised a series of addresses and demonstrations in the large towns,

and in particular took fresh steps for overthrowing the Liberals who

had helped to throw out the Affirmation Bill. Previous menaces had

reduced the number of these renegades in the last trial of strength;

and Torrens in particular now received hundreds of letters warning

him that he need not again stand for Finsbury. In the course of a

few months, Bradlaugh had addressed audiences numbering in all over

300,000, and nearly all were unanimously in his favour, while at none

did the malcontents number above two per cent. In some towns, as at

Halifax and Leeds, he had enormous open-air demonstrations, the numbers

coming to some fifty thousand. A densely packed meeting took place in

St James's Hall in July; and another Trafalgar Square demonstration

was held in August, attended by some thirty thousand men, of whom

hundreds came as delegates from the provinces; and concurrently with

these "constitutional" gatherings there was carried on the work of the

Association for the Repeal of the Blasphemy Laws, largely conducted

by advanced Unitarian clergymen, who worked with a disinterested zeal

worthy of the very highest praise, considering how little of personal

sympathy they could have had with the imprisoned Freethinkers.

In the way of more direct action, Bradlaugh on 5th July notified

Gladstone that he proposed again to present himself to take the oath,

and on the 9th Northcote interrogated the Premier on the subject. Left

to do as he would, Northcote once more moved that Bradlaugh be excluded

from the House until he should engage not to disturb its proceedings;

and on a division 232 voted for the motion and only 65 against,

Gladstone deprecating any division at all. On the next day, on receipt

of the order of exclusion, Bradlaugh notified Captain Gossett, the

Sergeant-at-Arms, that if Captain Gossett would say he interpreted the

order to involve the use of physical force to resist Bradlaugh's entry,

he would take legal proceedings to obtain a restraining injunction from

the High Court of Justice against such resistance. In this way the

legal question might be raised and settled without a fresh scuffle. In

the House the Speaker declined to let this letter be made ground of

discussion as a matter of "privilege," though he allowed the letter

to Gladstone to be so treated. The Sergeant-at-Arms, however, made

the requisite answer, and the action was duly begun (19th July). The

Treasury defended, and on Bradlaugh's appeal the case was tried by

a "full Court." It came on before Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, Mr

Justice Stephen, and Mr Justice Mathew, on 7th December, the defence

arguing by Demurrer to the Statement of Claim. Bradlaugh's pleading was

one long argument with the judges, who followed him with great care;

and on 9th February 1884 they gave their judgment, not unexpectedly,

against him. The view taken was, broadly, that "if injustice has been

done, it is an injustice for which the courts of law afford no remedy,"

which had been the contention of the Attorney-General. Mr Justice

Stephen, while concurring with Lord Coleridge to the above effect,

delivered a separate and very careful judgment. They could not, he said

in effect, assume that the House intentionally defied the law. It must

have supposed it was within the law. Then the Court could not pronounce

its action illegal without hearing its reasons. But the House could

not without loss of dignity give the Court its reasons, or allow the

Court to overrule them. Therefore the plaintiff, right or wrong, had no

legal redress. If wronged, he must go to the constituencies. In fine,

the breaking of any law by the House in its own procedure would not be

illegal, or, if it were, the illegality could not be redressed by the

law courts. The House of Commons might be restrained in the case of an

illegal order against a stranger, but not in the case of an illegal

order against one of its own members. If it erred or did injustice, it

was in the position of an erring or unjust judge, from whose decision

there was no appeal. The rights of the constituency of Northampton and

their member were strictly legal rights; but it lay with the House to

override them if it would.

Expecting this decision, Bradlaugh had already laid the new situation

before his constituents, in order to have their assent to his action on

the re-opening of Parliament, and once more they declared their entire

confidence in him. He had also arranged with the Tories, through his

colleague, to take no action in the House before 11th February, if

they would take none. His course now was to go to the House on 11th

February, go up to the table with Mr Labouchere and Mr Burt as his

introducers, and once more administer the oath to himself.

The Speaker gave the customary order to withdraw, and Northcote,

after stating that Bradlaugh had not taken the oath according to the

statute, absurdly moved that he "be not allowed to go through the form

of repeating the words of the oath prescribed by the statutes." Then

ensued the customary miscellaneous debate. Gladstone at much length

suggested that there should be no division. Mr Labouchere offered to

agree if Northcote would limit his motion to the time within which

it would be possible to obtain a legal decision on the legality of

Bradlaugh's latest act of self-swearing; but Northcote would not agree,

and Mr Labouchere proceeded forcibly to argue the point, not only

declaring the act to be in his opinion legal, but adding:--

"I confess that, for my part, I do regard these words of the oath

[which Bradlaugh had called an unmeaning form] as an utterly unmeaning

form--(Opposition cries of 'Oh, oh')--utterly and absolutely

an unmeaning form. To me they are just the same superstitious

incantation--('Hear, hear,' laughter, 'Oh, oh,' and 'Order')--as the

trash of any Mumbo-Jumbo among African savages. (Renewed laughter,

cries of 'Oh, oh,' and 'Order.') Why do hon. gentlemen say 'Oh, oh'?

Are they aware that there are many in this House who regard these

words as a blasphemous form? ('Hear, hear.') I say I regard them as an

unmeaning form."

From this point at least, if not before, the proceedings against

Bradlaugh in the House may without fear of contradiction be described

as an indecent farce. His colleague had in the most aggressive

fashion, and within the House, declared the oath to be in his opinion

a superstitious, barbarous, and senseless incantation. Mr John Morley,

as Positivist, had taken the oath without contradiction. And before

either of these episodes Mr Ashton Dilke, whose vacated seat for

Newcastle Mr Morley obtained, had declared in the House, in course of

debate, that he was without belief in the reigning religion. Bradlaugh,

who heard the avowal, remarked on the stilled surprise with which it

was received. But no one ever sought to challenge the right of Mr

Dilke, Mr Morley, or Mr Labouchere to sit in virtue of having taken an

unbelieving oath. The Tory talk in the House of "profanation" is thus

stamped once for all as a tissue of the worst hypocrisy; and the Tory

leader and all his men stand convicted of a course of dissimulation

as cowardly as it was shameless. They would attack the "unpopular"

man; they would not obstruct Mr Morley, since that would bring up the

question of Tory Atheism; they would not proceed against Mr Labouchere,

since he was likely to publish in his journal the names of some of the

Tory Atheists.

Gross as it had become, the farce went on. Forster, who now spoke on

the subject for the first time, gave a touch of dignity to the debate

by protesting against Mr Labouchere's remarks on the oath (though

without proposing to have him proceeded against), and saying, as

Gladstone and others had said before, that the opposition to Bradlaugh

was one of the greatest blows against the cause of religion that had

been struck for many years. Northcote, making no comment whatever on Mr

Labouchere's hardy avowal, briefly explained the force of his motion;

and after this irregularity the debate grew more and more confused. It

was known that Bradlaugh meant as before to vote in the division; and

the Speaker was repeatedly appealed to to prevent it. He declared he

had not the power; and Mr Healy--in one of a series of grossly insolent

speeches, in which he spoke of "the Government, Bradlaugh & Co."--moved

immediately after the division, before the numbers were announced, that

the vote be expunged. After much squabbling, the House divided on this

point, when there voted 258 Ayes and 161 Noes. Bradlaugh's vote with

the Noes was thus "disallowed;" but after the voting on the original

motion had been stated--280 Ayes and 167 Noes--Mr Labouchere announced

that Bradlaugh had voted with the Noes on the motion to expunge his

previous vote. The farce was thus pretty complete.

Northcote then made his usual motion to exclude Bradlaugh "from the

precincts of the House until he shall engage not further to disturb the

proceedings of the House." Again the debate broke out. Mr Labouchere

offered to undertake that if the motion was withdrawn Bradlaugh should

not disturb the proceedings until he had obtained a legal decision

on this last oath-taking; and Gladstone and Bright pointed out the

hardship and indignity of excluding Bradlaugh from the very library

and lobbies of the House; but Northcote, swayed as usual by the worst

of his followers, pressed his motion, disregarding Mr Burt's final

repetition of the undertaking that Bradlaugh should not disturb the

proceedings till his law case was settled. On a division, 228 voted

for the final indignity, and only 120 against. The farce had become

as ignoble as meanness could make it; and Northcote was admitted by

most people to have fully realised the character in which he was more

than once presented by the caricaturists--of pantaloon to Churchill's

clown in the Tory pantomime. Churchill took the lead on the following

evening when, Bradlaugh having "applied for the Chiltern Hundreds,"

Mr Labouchere moved that a new writ be issued for Northampton.[184]

The hereditarily noble lord saw that if Bradlaugh were re-elected

they would be no further forward; and his object was to exclude him

permanently. He had lately given notice of a motion that Bradlaugh be

declared incapable in perpetuity of sitting, but had dropped it as

hopeless. He now "moved the adjournment of the debate." A straggling

and noisy debate ensued, in which Mr Healy was pronounced disorderly by

the Speaker for his interruptions of Northcote, whose ally he had been.

On a division, only 145 voted for the adjournment, and 203 against.

Then more discussion as to whether the Chancellor of the Exchequer had

the right to grant the Chiltern Hundreds, the motion for the new writ

being finally agreed to.

[Footnote 184: In this case the Government arranged to sue Bradlaugh

in the Courts for the penalties that would be incurred if his last

oath-taking and voting were pronounced illegal by the Courts. It was

accordingly left to Bradlaugh to vacate his seat by his own act.]

Unseated for the third time since his perfectly valid return in 1880,

Bradlaugh appealed to his constituents to elect him for the fourth

time, and was received by them with if possible greater enthusiasm than

ever. A new Tory candidate, Mr H. C. Richards, had been for some time

in the field, and the seat was fought in the old fashion; but whether

owing to the feebleness of the candidate, whom Bradlaugh generally

treated with humorous contempt, or a sense of shame among some of

the local Tories, the opposition vote now fell away. The forces of

bigotry had squeezed the last possible vote out of the borough, and

after a short and strenuous struggle the poll (19th February 1884)

ran: Bradlaugh, 4032; Richards, 3664. Bradlaugh had clearly "touched

bottom," and begun to rise again. At the general election he had polled

3827, and been 695 above the highest Tory; in 1881 he had only polled

3437, a majority of only 132; in 1882, polling 3796, he was only

108 above his opponent with 3688; now he had reached a higher figure

than ever, polling 368 more than the Tory, who was 24 below the last

Tory vote. The Tory game was now hopeless so far as Northampton was

concerned.

The badgered Northcote, goaded by his lawless following, now proposed

to take the step of preventing Bradlaugh from entering the House on

his new return. Learning this, Bradlaugh on the 20th wrote a letter of

protest to the Speaker and the Premier, and the anticipatory course was

prevented. But when on the 21st the Speaker read to the House a second

letter in which Bradlaugh formally undertook (as his introducers had

undertaken for him before) not to present himself at the table until

judgment should be given in the test action to be laid against him by

the Government. All the same, Northcote moved, amid cries of "Shame,"

his old resolution of exclusion "from the precincts." The Tory army had

to be solaced somehow for Bradlaugh's decisive victory at the poll.

Gladstone opposed, and yet again there was a miscellaneous debate,

in the course of which Churchill made the worthy suggestion that the

Government meant that Mr Bradlaugh was to be allowed once more to

appeal to the mob, in order that not only the House of Commons might

be prejudiced, but that even the courts of law might be biased by the

demonstration in his favour. On a division, 226 voted for Northcote's

motion and only 173 against. Bradlaugh was now denied the use of the

House's library for the lawsuit pending against him on the House's

behalf. He addressed to Northcote, and printed in his journal, an open

letter touched with indignant contempt.

The critical part of the letter, and perhaps the special sting of some

of the phrases--as, "You wear knightly orders. You should be above

a knave's spitefulness"--moved Northcote to send a long defensive

reply, repeating the "profanation" formula, and concluding: "The

inconveniences of which you complain are inconveniences which you

might, if you chose, put an end to to-morrow"--which meant that

Bradlaugh might have the use of the House if only he would undertake

never again under any circumstances to try to take his seat. To

this "knightly" suggestion[185] Bradlaugh replied with perhaps too

scrupulous courtesy of form, but with sufficient emphasis, and turned

himself once more to the struggle outside.

[Footnote 185: The harping on the "chivalry" of Northcote by Mr Lang

and others is an interesting light on the nature of their ideals.

Northcote was certainly more of a gentleman than were his accomplices

in the Bradlaugh struggle, but barring his comparative moderation,

there was not a gleam of "chivalry" in his whole conduct of the

business. As for the mass of his followers, they had, as Sir George

Trevelyan has said of the Tories who ostracised Wilkes, "as much

chivalry in them as a pack of prairie wolves round a wounded buffalo."

Mr Lang ("Life," ii. 136) writes that "an acute and well-informed

critic has singled out Sir Stafford Northcote's treatment of the

questions raised by Mr Bradlaugh as the best example of Sir Stafford

Northcote's tact and adroitness." The "adroitness" need not be

disputed. But Mr Lang, on his own part, holds that "it would throw no

light on Sir Stafford Northcote's leadership to follow the details of

this tedious and protracted struggle." For "light" and "leadership,"

read "credit" and "character," and the proposition would be quite

valid.]

§ 21.

From this point forward it is difficult to record the course of the

Parliamentary struggle with the serious patience hitherto spent on

the narrative. On the side of the House it had become a revolting

hypocrisy, since Bradlaugh was being ostracised for what other men

were allowed to do freely; and the form of legality put on in the

resort to the law courts was only a new simulation. The law courts had

declared that they could have no possible jurisdiction over the House

in such matters however it might break the law, and still the House was

formally proceeding to obtain from the law courts penalties against

Bradlaugh for trying to fulfil the law when the House hindered him.

The House knew quite well that if it had even declared him entitled to

affirm under the existing law, no court would have decided otherwise.

The hostile decision was here a foregone conclusion; for _a fortiori_

the courts, after their last emphatic decision, would not prevent the

House from interpreting the law as to swearing in its own way. Only the

strenuous energy of Bradlaugh, joined with his chivalrous belief in the

ideal rectitude and jurisdiction of the judges, could have set any man

in his position on a fresh legal adventure.

Begun in March 1884, the lawsuit at the instance of the Government

came on before Lord Chief Justice Coleridge, Mr Justice Grove, Mr

Baron Huddleston, "sitting at bar," and a special jury, on 13th,

15th, 17th, and 18th June. Against Bradlaugh were arrayed five

counsel,--the Attorney-General, the Solicitor-General, Sir Hardinge

Giffard, Mr Danckwertz, and Mr R. S. Wright, and the case was argued at

enormous length on a multitude of minutiæ as to Bradlaugh's original

evidence before the first Select Committee, the practice of the House,

the position of the Speaker on 11th February, the law as to what

constituted the oath, the force of an oath taken by an atheist, and

so on. After two delays, caused by the illness of Lord Coleridge, his

summing-up, which was proportionately long and elaborate, was given

on 30th June. It advised the jury that the weight of evidence was to

show that Bradlaugh was all along an unbeliever in a Supreme Being--a

point which Bradlaugh argued should not have been raised--that in law a

person on whose conscience an oath would have "no binding effect" was

a person who could not legally take a oath; and that Bradlaugh had not

taken the oath in accordance with the practice of Parliament. The other

judges concurred; but Lord Coleridge having spoken of inquisitorial

questions on belief in general (not those in the Bradlaugh case in

particular) as "hateful" and "disgusting," Mr Baron Huddleston desired

to express dissent on that head, while Mr Justice Grove said he

would call them, "to use a mild term, extremely objectionable." The

Lord Chief Justice, remarking that he felt strongly on the matter,

gracefully agreed that his words should be "discounted" on that score.

Formally, there went to the jury eight questions, to this effect: (1)

Was the Speaker sitting when Bradlaugh took the oath on 11th February?

(2) Was he sitting to prepare notes for use in addressing Bradlaugh?

(3) Had he resumed his seat to let Bradlaugh swear? (4) Was Bradlaugh

then without belief in a Supreme Being? (5) Was he a person on whose

conscience an oath, _as an oath_, had no binding force? (6) Had the

House full cognisance of these matters through Bradlaugh's avowal?

(7) Did he take the oath according to Parliamentary practice? (8)

Generally, did he take and subscribe the oath?

The jury's answers were, in brief:--(1) Sitting; (2) Sitting to prepare

notes as stated; (3) No; (4) He had no such belief; (5) Yes; (6) Yes;

(7) Not according to the "full" practice; (8) Not as an oath.

Bradlaugh at once asked for a stay of judgment in order to enable him

"to move for a new trial to move to enter judgment for the defendant

_non-obstante veredicto_, and to move for arrest of judgment."

Outsiders had supposed that the jury trial ended the matter, but it was

not so. Bradlaugh wrote in his journal undauntedly: "If my constituents

still give me their confidence, nothing can defeat me;" and when

friends wrote that they could see no hope of good from the "wearisome

and disappointing litigation," he characteristically answered:--

"There are only two weapons to defend the right with: Law and Force.

As yet I try the law; and so long as I believe, as I do believe,

the law to be on my side, it is to the law and to public opinion I

ought to appeal. My opponents rely on force and trick. If the law was

actually against me they would take away my seat by law. This they do

not even try to do. They hope to weary my constituents, and to tire

and ruin me in this contest. Hampden, resisting ship-money, fought

more than three years in the law courts; but his wearisome litigation

was not quite in vain. Wilkes, backed by Earl Temple with purse and

power, struggled with the Commons through several weary years, and at

last Middlesex gave him victory."

The appeal was, on the face of it, a better case than Bradlaugh had

had in defending the action of the Crown. It came on, on 6th December,

before the same judges, sitting "_in banc_," who had tried the action

"at bar," Bradlaugh turning out to be right in his theory of the

proper procedure, whereas the judges had all been avowedly in doubt.

But the greater apparent force of the case as now put did not avail.

Bradlaugh cogently argued that no Act of Parliament gave the least

countenance to the notion that Atheists were to be disabled from

swearing. The Parliamentary Oaths Act of 1866, cap. xix., enjoins on

members of Parliament, with the exception only of those qualified to

affirm, the taking of an oath of allegiance of uniform phrasing, thus

admitting of no disability, and making an end of any disability which

may be supposed to have previously existed. Yet again, an Act of 1867

expressly provided that any subject of Her Majesty, _without reference

to his religious belief_, should take the oath of allegiance on taking

office. But Lord Coleridge had in the previous trial fully made up his

mind that "oath" must mean "adjuration made by one believing in the

Deity adjured," and he early indicated that this conviction overthrew

all arguments from the mere wording of statutes. On the Act of 1867

he remarked (with a discourtesy which for him was unusual, and which

disappears in the report) that "a little common sense and a little

knowledge of history" would have made the appellant aware that that

Act was passed on behalf of a Roman Catholic judge. Bradlaugh knew

the facts well enough, and capped the Lord Chief Justice's history

with some more, all going to show that the wish of the legislature

had then been to sweep away all religious disabilities whatever. It

was all to no purpose. Lord Coleridge was rather a man of strong

sentiments than a strong lawyer. He hated all persecution on behalf of

religion; and on behalf of Messrs Foote and Ramsey he stated the law

of blasphemy in the mildest possible way--a way to which Mr Justice

Stephen, albeit a rationalist, declared he could not subscribe. But

Lord Coleridge was also an emotional Christian; and though his admired

friend Arnold would readily have taken the oath without any belief in

the Deity adjured, his Lordship was strongly averse to having it taken

by an "aggressive" Atheist; and though he must have known perfectly

well that in Parliament there had for generations been known holders

of atheistic views, and that nobody proposed their exclusion, he yet

chose to assume that all laws as to oath-taking were meant to exclude

oath-taking by Atheists. One or two notable passages took place between

him and the appellant. Lord Coleridge, in his nervous irritation at

being persistently argued against, once so far forgot himself as to say

Bradlaugh was wasting time. The charge was too bad: Bradlaugh was one

of the closest and concisest of pleaders, as many judges had admitted;

and at a later stage in this trial the Lord Chief Justice took back his

words. At another point he somewhat impatiently deprecated a particular

line of argument, and Bradlaugh quietly answered, "My Lord, I must

fight with what weapons I can." Once or twice more his lordship was

rather idly petulant,[186] but this was transient; and he was very

genial when, on his remarking, "It may be, of course, that you are

right and we are all wrong," the appellant answered, "With the utmost

respect, my lord, that is practically what I am going to contend."

[Footnote 186: I was present at this trial, and took notes for an

article.]

Justice Grove, an amiable and fair though unsubtle judge, argued very

courteously (while incidentally avowing that his sympathies were on the

side of minimising oaths) that the legislature could not be held to

have enacted an oath in the tolerant expectation that it would be taken

by some men for whom the adjuration had no meaning. That was no doubt a

perfectly reasonable point for a judge to put; but, on the other hand,

nothing is more common than the plea of judges--it was made by Justice

Grove himself--that they have only to do with the law as it stands;

and if in this case they were to look into the probable state of mind

of the legislature, it was plainly their business to take into account

all the well-known facts of the case, including the notorious fact that

members known to their fellow-members to be Atheists or "Lucretian"

Theists had repeatedly sat in the House.

Their lordships, of course, repeated their former decision--Lord

Coleridge giving the very inaccurate reason that no "new point" or "new

argument" had been raised--and the rule for a new trial was refused.

Immediately Bradlaugh appealed; and the case was heard (on the motion

for a new trial, and, secondarily for seven days' time to move for

arrest of judgment after the first motion should have been adjudged

upon) in the Court of Appeal on 15th December by Lords Justices Brett

(Master of the Rolls), Cotton, and Lindley. These judges heard the

appeal with great patience, and on the 18th gave judgment to the effect

that they could not grant a rule for a new trial on the ground that

the verdict was against the evidence. But on "many other questions

in the case which it is not improbable might all be raised upon the

appeal by way of arrest of judgment," they thought it right to grant

"a rule _nisi_ to show cause upon all the other points taken by the

defendant, upon condition that the appeal in arrest of judgment is

brought on at the same time." The argument on this rule was taken on

26th January 1885, when the Attorney-General and Sir Hardinge Giffard

argued (a point which had been left open before) that no appeal lay,

the case being technically a criminal one. This plea, after voluminous

argument, was overruled--the point being settled by Bradlaugh's

references to portions of the Crown Suits Act which the other side had

not dealt with. Then came the argument on the main issue. To a lay

listener Lord Justice Brett seemed to give a more strictly judicial

attention to the problem than did any of the judges who had dealt with

it hitherto, and never was the subject more fully illuminated. In a

previous trial Justice Grove had noticed the anomaly that whereas an

oath or affirmation was set up as a means of securing true answers,

the judge had to satisfy himself beforehand on a witness's bare word as

to the nominally all-important point whether an oath would be "binding

on his conscience." Bradlaugh now brought out another no less precious

anomaly, namely, that the Speaker, at the opening of Parliament, must

of necessity administer the oath to himself; and that the first forty

members _must positively break the law_, seeing that they swear while

there is not a "full House" sitting. Another curious issue was raised

by the Court. An unbeliever could certainly be punished for perjury;

how, then, could his oath be "no oath," when perjury expressly meant

false testimony given on oath? Sir Hardinge Giffard's answer was that

no man may "take profit from his own wrong." It might have been more

dramatically put that the Christian law says to the Atheist, "Heads, we

win; tails, you lose."

Despite the fairness of the hearing given, it soon became apparent that

the Master of the Rolls held that "religious test" could only mean

test as between different forms of religion, and that to exclude an

Atheist from civic rights is not to impose a religious test. Now, the

English tests of last century were as between sects, not as between

religions; that is, they were denominational; that is, political.

Still, they were always known as religious tests. It would surely

follow that "religious test" meant any test connected with religious

matters. In that case Lord Justice Brett's distinction was completely

arbitrary and fallacious. But on grounds such as these, among others,

the judgment was given (28th January) against the appellant. It was

certainly an able judgment--as able as it was lengthy. It raised,

among other things, the exquisitely complicated anomaly that Bradlaugh

could satisfy a judge on his bare statement that he was an Atheist,

and yet, after affirming on that ground, could be solemnly examined

as to whether he was an Atheist. And the judge very explicitly laid

it down that if a non-believer in a falsehood-punishing Deity were to

take the oath unopposed, with all the customary formalities, he could

on proof be sued for the penalty of £500 for every vote he had given.

This meant, if anything, that the Atheists or Agnostics then sitting in

Parliament were all so liable.

Lord Justice Cotton, with much simplicity, laid it down that the law of

England "undoubtedly" was that if a person in the "unhappy position" of

not believing in a lie-avenging Deity took the oath, it was not a real

oath. And Lord Justice Lindley, with a certain cynical candour, dealt

with Bradlaugh's main argument, that it was absurd to hold that a man

is by law incapable of doing that which the law requires him to do. "I

agree in the absurdity," said his lordship, "but not in the argument

adduced from it." He held that the only solution would be that the

defendant "could not be properly elected."

"It is a mistake to suppose," said Lord Justice Lindley further,

"and I think it is as well the mistake should be known, that persons

who do not believe in a Supreme Being are in the state in which it

is now supposed they are. There are old Acts of Parliament still

unrepealed by which such people can be cruelly persecuted. Whether

that is a state of law which ought to remain or not is not for me to

express an opinion upon; but having regard to the fact that these

Acts of Parliament still remain unrepealed, I do not see my way to

hold judicially that this oath was not kept alive by Parliament _for

the very purpose, amongst others, of keeping such people out of

Parliament_."

This last deliverance is memorable on several grounds--memorable as

showing the need, from the point of view of one more judge, for a

repeal of the brutal laws of the past against heresy; and further

memorable as showing once more how ready are judges to rest alternately

on mutually exclusive principles of interpretation. On the point as to

whether the case was one in which an appeal lay, Lord Justice Lindley

grounded his opinion on the fact that there was not to be found in

the Judicature Act "the slightest indication of any intention on

the part of the legislature" to prevent appeals in cases which were

"previously made civil proceedings for the purposes of appeals." On

the same principle, he ought to have looked whether there were the

"slightest indication of any intention on the part of the legislature"

in modern acts to exclude all Atheists from oath-taking. There is no

such indication. Not a word is said of excluding unbelievers. On the

contrary, it was only with difficulty that the legislature could be

got to meet the fact that there _were_ many Atheists who at times had

to give testimony in courts of law. Had the legislature really desired

to exclude all Atheists from oath-taking it would surely have said so,

knowing as it must have done how common unbelieving oath-taking had

been. And all the judges, as individuals, must have known perfectly

well that privately known Atheists had sat in every Parliament for

generations. Such are the conditions of legal judgment on questions of

legal principle.

Bradlaugh at once gave notice of appeal to the House of Lords; and,

all things considered, he had as good chances of success as ever he

had. But this litigation had now reached its climax, and the appeal

did not come off. The struggle had gone far towards completing

its fifth year, and relief was almost within sight. It was not to

come from legislation. Mr Hopwood had undertaken to introduce an

affirmation Bill grappling with the whole position, which was not

merely an affair of the admission of Atheists, but of providing

also for certain religionists who, not being Quakers, Moravians, or

Separatists, were not entitled to affirm, though strongly objecting

to the oath. And there were yet further matters to be dealt with, as

the position of freethinking jurors. But the saving credit of passing

such a measure was not in store for the "Liberal" Parliament. At the

Liberal Conference on Reform in 1884, presided over by Mr John Morley,

a resolution had been unanimously carried in favour of Northampton's

right; and at the Conference of the National Liberal Federation in

1885, Mr Hopwood's Bill was unanimously approved of; but though this

action was backed up by countless resolutions of Liberal and Radical

Clubs, and hundreds of petitions,[187]

[Footnote 187: By August, 655 petitions had been presented, with 77,639

signatures.]

the Anglican and Roman Churches set to work as zealously as ever

to oppose, the Liberal Government would make no attempt to grant

facilities in the House, the Bill was blocked, and nothing was done

while that Government remained in office. But when, on their being

defeated at their own wish on the Budget, a Conservative Ministry took

office, Bradlaugh at once presented himself (6th July) to be sworn. He

might have presented himself before the re-elected Tory ministers, in

which case they could not have taken part in the proceedings against

him, but he treated them with the chivalry they never showed to him,

and allowed the ministers first to be sworn in. The new Chancellor

of the Exchequer, Sir Michael Hicks Beach, took up the matter on the

lines of Northcote, who was now made a peer, and moved that Bradlaugh

be as before excluded from the precincts. Mr Parnell and Mr Healy went

further, appealing to the Speaker to have Bradlaugh (who was standing

below the bar) wholly excluded from the House at once, before the

motion was debated. To this stretch of malice the Speaker could not

accede, and the debate proceeded in the usual way. Mr Hopwood moved an

amendment declaring legislation to be necessary "on wider grounds than

the interests of a constituency." Gladstone, though deprecating any

general legislation on the subject, supported the amendment. Only 219

voted for it, however, and 263 against, the majority again including

many Home Rulers and a number of Liberals, while many more Liberals

had absented themselves. Against most of these, vigorous measures were

taken in the constituencies, which now had before them the imminent

prospect of a fresh general election. In this election it had been

arranged that Bradlaugh should stand for the new borough of East

Finsbury, London, as well as for Northampton, on the understanding that

if elected for both he should sit for Northampton. This was a generous

attempt on the part of the Finsbury Radicals to strengthen his case;

but other Radical candidates being less generous, he finally withdrew

from the Finsbury candidature to avoid a split in the Radical camp.

In Northampton the fight had little excitement in it, the conclusion

being foregone. Mr Richards at one of his meetings claimed credit

for avoiding personalities, and mentioned that he had in his pockets

letters from several persons offering to flood Northampton with

slanderous tracts. He did not add that that device had been played out,

and had become just a little unsafe besides. Towards the election day

virulent placards were resorted to, from force of habit. Bradlaugh did

not post a single bill. The poll (25th November) stood:--Labouchere,

4845; Bradlaugh, 4315; Richards, 3890; Bradlaugh thus standing higher

than ever before. The difference between him and his colleague was

represented by 366 plumpers for Mr Labouchere, and 300 votes split with

the Tory, less 126 plumpers for Bradlaugh, and 10 split for him and the

Tory. The news was received everywhere with special enthusiasm. But

still more significant was the havoc wrought among those pseudo-Liberal

members who had turned the scale against Bradlaugh in the House. Mr

Samuel Morley had been forced to retire from Bristol, Mr M'Cullagh

Torrens from Finsbury, the Hon. H. W. Fitzwilliam from Dewsbury, Mr

Jerningham from Berwick, and then later from Blackpool, the selection

being cancelled before the election; Mr George Courtauld, Unitarian,

from Maldon, Sir Alexander Gordon from Aberdeenshire, Sir Thomas

Chambers from Marylebone, and Baron de Ferrières from Cheltenham.

These were all opposed by former supporters on the express ground of

their votes in the Northampton question. Others who went to the poll,

again, were defeated on the same score. Mr Norwood at Hull was defeated

by the running of a special Radical candidate in protest against

his anti-Bradlaugh action in the House. Mr A. P. Vivian, a frequent

absentee on the question, was defeated in North-west Cornwall, and Sir

W. Charley at Ipswich. Mr B. Whitworth, formerly of Drogheda, chosen

and then dismissed at Hackney, was defeated at Lewisham. Prominent

Tory and other enemies suffered in a hardly less degree. Newdegate,

after beginning his candidature, withdrew rather than meet certain

defeat; Sir Henry Drummond Wolff was defeated, so was Earl Percy, so

was Sir J. E. Wilmot, so was Mr Warton, so was "O'Donnell." Dr Lyons

collapsed at nomination in Dublin. M'Coan was thrown out at Lancaster,

Mr Nicholson at Petersfield, and Mr Denzil Onslow at Poplar. Of new

Tory candidates who had been specially offensive in their hostility,

Mr Hammond was beaten at Newcastle, Mr Bruce Wentworth at Barnsley,

Mr Holloway at Stroud, and Mr Edwardes-Moss at Southport. There was

no mistaking the "Bradlaugh element" in these cases; and though some

Radicals who had stood by him were also defeated, as Mr Hopwood and Mr

Hugh Mason, that was solely owing to the hostility of the Irish vote,

then being manoeuvred by Parnell to weaken the Liberals. Much of the

work of destroying the renegade Liberals had been done by Bradlaugh in

person in his lecturing tours. "I think I have settled a round dozen of

them," he remarked some time before the election. One former Liberal

member, who had been his persistent enemy in the House, finding defeat

staring him in the face through Bradlaugh's action, came to him in his

hotel when he was lecturing in the constituency concerned, and humbled

himself to ask for mercy. Bradlaugh gravely refused. "You are very

hard," whined the petitioner, who had thought fit to work iniquity with

the majority for five long years, with as little thought of justice as

of generosity.

The tables thus turned, it is probable that in the first Parliament

which assembled in 1886, an Affirmation Bill could have been carried

in the teeth of the Tory minority, seeing that even some Tory members

had had to pledge themselves to support such a Bill; and Mr Serjeant

Simon had arranged to re-introduce Mr Hopwood's. But the settlement

was precipitated in an unexpected way. Bradlaugh wrote Sir Michael

Beach asking how the Government would treat the Bill if introduced,

and received a non-committal answer. Soon afterwards it was announced

that communications had passed on the subject between Sir Michael and

the new Speaker-elect, Mr Peel; and Bradlaugh wrote to ask Sir Michael

what they were, but was refused the information, whereupon he strongly

protested. The mystery was only cleared up when the new Parliament

assembled on 13th January 1886.[188] The new Speaker had determined

to reverse the policy of his predecessor in the Bradlaugh case, and

the Tory Cabinet in vain sought to dissuade him. On the opening day,

before any members were sworn, he informed the House that he had had

two communications--one from Sir Michael Hicks Beach, and one from two

other members, Mr Raikes and Sir John Kennaway, appealing to him not

to let Bradlaugh take the oath. To these requests he flatly declined

to accede. In the former Parliament, he pointed out, the Speaker had

taken no independent authority on himself, but had always acted on the

instructions of the House. "We are assembled," he went on,

[Footnote 188: This Parliament is alluded to as "of 1885" by Mr

Walpole, Mr Lang, and others. It was elected in 1885, but did not

assemble till 1886.]

"in a new Parliament. I know nothing of the resolutions of the past.

(Cheers.) They have lapsed; they are void; they are of no effect

in reference to this case. (Renewed cheers.) It is the right, the

legal, statutable obligation of members, when returned to this

House, to come to the table and take the oath prescribed by statute.

('Hear, hear.') I have no authority, I have no right, original or

delegated, to stand between an hon. member and his taking of the oath.

('Hear, hear.') I have been further asked whether, when the House

is completed, and after a quorum has been constituted, it would be

competent for a motion to be made intervening between the hon. member

for Northampton and his taking of the oath. I have come clearly and

without hesitation to the conclusion that it would neither be my duty

to prohibit the hon. gentleman from coming, nor to permit a motion to

be made standing between him and his taking of the oath. (Opposition

cheers.) The hon. member takes that oath under whatever risks may

attach to him in a court of law. ('Hear, hear.') But it is not for

me--I respectfully say it is not for the House--to enter into any

inquisition--(cheers)--as to what may be the opinions of a member when

he comes to the table to take the oath. I am bound, and the House is

bound, by the forms of this House, and by the legal obligations and

rights of members. If a member comes to this table and offers to take

the oath, I know of no right whatever to intervene between him and the

form, of legal and statutable obligation. (Cheers.)"

The Chancellor of the Exchequer in vain sought to make a declaration:

he was called to order. Bradlaugh was duly sworn, with a Tory Ministry

in nominal command of the House. The protesters against "profanation"

had to stand by and see what they had defined as profanation

"solemnly"--as the law courts defined solemnity--authorised by the

supreme authority of the House. They had refused to permit affirmation;

their oath was now, on their own declaration, outraged and trampled

upon. At the same time, the whole past procedure of the House, the

whole course of the last Speaker, was overruled and impeached as

unwarrantable. The House had drunk its cup to the dregs.

§ 22.

The Tory press naturally solaced itself by repeating the well-tried

falsehood that Bradlaugh had originally refused to take the oath,

and declaring that he had now eaten his words. On 26th January,

dissatisfied with that unsubstantial comfort, Mr Raikes asked the

Government if they would prevent Bradlaugh from sitting and voting

until he had proved his capacity to take the oath, or until the

judgment of the Court of Appeal was reversed by a higher tribunal.

Sir M. Hicks Beach formally replied that he was not prepared to take

action, and no action of the kind was ever taken. Soon the Tories,

being in the minority in the House, were turned out and the Liberals

installed in their places. Appealed to to enter a _stet processus_ in

the action in which Bradlaugh had appealed, they timorously declined,

dreading Tory comment. But when the Tories later in the year were

returned to power by the election following on Mr Gladstone's defeat on

his first Home Rule Bill, and Lord Randolph Churchill became leader of

the House of Commons, that versatile personage, desirous of placating

if possible so formidable and so avowed an enemy as Bradlaugh, gave

the relief which the Liberals had refused. Bradlaugh was thus finally

secured in his seat by the capitulation of one of the most unscrupulous

and offensive of his old enemies. Churchill's allusion in the House

to Bradlaugh's supporters as the "scum and dregs of the nation" had

elicited from Bradlaugh, in connection with his agitation against

perpetual pensions, a short tractate on the manner of the founding of

the Churchill family, which struck his lordship in a fashion he had not

been used to at the hands of Gladstone, or even of Mr Chamberlain; and

he desired to make peace. He did not obtain it.

But not only did the Tory party, as represented by its new leader in

the Commons, thus give up all it had contended for: it was finally to

make personal submission to the man it had wronged. The Affirmation

Bill introduced by Mr Serjeant Simon never reached a debate; and it was

left to Bradlaugh to carry one on his own initiative in 1888, by the

votes of the men, Tory and Parnellite, who had defeated former Bills.

Last of all, it was in the same Tory House of Commons, while Bradlaugh

lay dying, that there was carried the resolution he had repeatedly put

down, expunging from the journals of the House the old votes for his

exclusion, even as the resolutions against Wilkes had been expunged.

If the act was one of repentance, it the more certainly implied an

infamous wrong done.

There were certainly many reasons why the Tory party should repent.

They had "struck for themselves an evil blow," though the sudden

rising of the Home Rule issue served to obscure the consequences of

their course in the Northampton struggle. It was impossible that as a

party they could have gained in credit by it either among the masses

or among thoughtful and earnest men. Nothing was more notorious than

that nine-tenths of the leading Bradlaugh-baiters were the least worthy

men in the House. Wolff, described by Bradlaugh as a noted retailer of

_choses grivoises_; Churchill, the noisy and reckless charlatan of the

new Toryism, "the Demosthenes of bad taste and vulgar vehemence;"[189]

Tyler, the company-promoter, hooted by the shareholders he had

impoverished; "O'Donnell," the turncoat; Callan, the drunken;

Newdegate, besotted with more fumes than those of fanaticism; Fowler

and Warton, the gross and blatant; Healy, the ever-rowdy--these could

not gain good repute from alliance with types like Mr Samuel Morley,

and could not be made respectable by the leadership of Northcote, whom

they hustled and humiliated. It is not possible to say with entire

certainty what had been the general view of Beaconsfield on the case

while he lived; but it is difficult to believe that he could have

taken any satisfaction in seeing the most prominent function of the

new Toryism made out to be the rowdy resistance to the sitting of a

freethinking member, and the insolent refusal of a constituency's

rights.

[Footnote 189: Byron's description of a better man.]

There can be no doubt, I think, that one effect of the whole episode

was to create a new and widespread intensity of antagonism to the

prevailing religion and to the Conservative cause. Men who had before

regarded Christianity with indifference or disfavour or contempt, as a

delusion, began to detest it as a living fountain of injustice; and men

who had seen in recent Conservatism a policy of diverting the people's

attention from home needs by foreign adventure, now saw in it a great

machinery for working iniquity within the State. The party which had

been seen making gun-wadding of the decalogue in its wars of aggression

had now made a crass Semitic Theism the pretext for a dastardly effort

to crush one man, partly by way of embarrassing the opposite side; and

the party which denounced "disloyalty" took sides with the disloyalists

to the same end. Of course, the heat of the immediate struggle did

not last on one side any more than on the other; above all, it did

not last with Bradlaugh himself; but it is certain that thousands of

Freethinkers date their conversion from the time of Bradlaugh's fight

with the bigots; and I fancy there are still many who preserve the

impression they then gained of what Voltaire meant by "the infamous,"

and the purpose they then formed to make war on it throughout their

lives. As regards Toryism, too, though "each day brings its petty

dust, our soon-choked souls to fill," the adherents of that cause may

rely on it that for many a citizen, for many a day to come, their

declarations of concern for justice and right, in any case whatever,

are made derisory by memories of their five-year-long course of gleeful

injustice to the Atheist. Time brings its revenges. If Liberals in

mass have deserved ten years of frustration, in an effort to do right,

by their former treatment of Ireland, Tories in turn have wrought for

the cup of defeat they have tasted, and are yet to drain to the dregs.

And the Irishmen who, claiming freedom for themselves, shamelessly

withheld from another even the rights they already enjoyed--they, too,

have paid and are paying for their misdeeds, despite their avowed

repentance.

As for the Conservative party, despite its practical recantation, it

would be too much to say that there is any real concern among the

mass of its members for the five years' carnival of injustice over

Bradlaugh. I have gone through Mr Lang's "Life of Northcote" without

finding one word of regret for the whole shameful business, though

he quotes a passage in which Northcote expressed in his diary a mild

deprecation of the ruffianism of some of his followers in the matter.

But, indeed, the capacity to do the thing as it was done excludes the

capacity to be ashamed of it. Toryism is transmuted, but does not

repent. At best, new Tories may at times deprecate the action of their

predecessors.

§ 23.

Whatever be the sympathies with which the matter is looked at, there

is no gainsaying the historical fact that Bradlaugh's struggle is a

decisive episode in constitutional history. It will always rank in

English annals with the partially parallel case of Wilkes, dating a

hundred and twenty years earlier; and it will be a very bold or a

very blind majority which ever again attempts to exclude from the

House of Commons a duly-elected member against whom no legal objection

lies. Of Wilkes, Mr Gladstone has declared that whether we choose it

or not, his name must be enrolled among those of the great champions

of English freedom. If that be so, Bradlaugh's name must stand still

higher, in that it represents not only the principle of the rights of

constituencies, but the principle of freedom of conscience in the last

and most serious issue. And in every moral respect, Bradlaugh's case

stands above that of Wilkes. The point in which they best compare is

their courage; but even the undoubted courage with which Wilkes faced

an unpopular king and unpopular ministers was a less rare thing than

the fortitude which faced the hate and the slander of half of the more

articulate part of the nation. For the rest, though he had the merit

of geniality, Wilkes was a poor creature enough in many ways--a rascal

towards his wife, a leader of ribald orgies, a prurient poetaster,

a briber of constituencies, while professing to be uncorrupting and

incorruptible. He was a blasphemer in the strict and really bad sense

of a man deriding a Deity in whom he did not profess to disbelieve;

he wrote and privately printed indecent verse for the indecency's

sake. And if he is to be remembered for courage in that he resisted an

unpopular Ministry with a great and aristocratic party to support and

salary him, much more so is Bradlaugh, who was scouted and insulted by

many even of the Liberals that felt constrained at times to vote on his

behalf, and who had little save poor men's help in his long and costly

fight. It is significant of the worth of common opinion that Wilkes

was much more readily forgiven for real and ill-meant and undisputed

obscenity than was Bradlaugh for the earnest and scrupulous defence of

true doctrines infamously miscalled obscene. On the point of politics,

Wilkes is hardly more justly notable than on the point of character.

He had no higher mission than to attack an autocratic and unpopular

minister; his very animus was partly the evil and vulgar spirit of

racial animosity; he had no high purpose of political reform. After

unwilling drudgery in a public office of dignity, he found his chosen

reward in a semi-sinecure. Bradlaugh stood for great causes in the

world of thought as well as in the world of action: he was a thinker

and a high-minded reformer where Wilkes was at best a high-spirited

adventurer.

And as Wilkes was the worse man, so he had the worse case. When elected

in 1768, he was legally an outlaw--albeit under an unjust sentence;

and his supporters signalised his success by a riot, breaking windows

wholesale, mobbing and insulting leading opponents. Afterwards he was

elected while a prisoner. Certainly Parliament, in his case, took a

more courageously illegal course than it did in Bradlaugh's, not only

refusing to admit him, but declaring him disqualified, voiding his

seat, and declaring Luttrell member when elected by the minority. The

jugglers of 1880-85 kept a member out of his seat without daring to

declare the seat therefore vacant, though the law courts hinted not

obscurely that an Atheist was _hors la loi_ in respect of the chief

civic rights. Certainly in the case of Wilkes the King was known to

be the main mover in the breaking of the law, and so was more openly

putting the liberties of the whole people in jeopardy. But the fact

that in Bradlaugh's case the tyrants were bigots and partisans,

representing masses of electors, and the wronged man a heretic,

only made the danger the more profound. The final triumph of the

law-breakers would in his case have been a worse blow to freedom than

it could have been in that of Wilkes, just because so many hundreds

of thousands of bigots would have rejoiced in it. It would have been

more dangerous to democracy, because undermining democracy from

within, whereas the ostracism of Wilkes was an ostentatious blow from

without. The "many-headed tyranny of an unscrupulous senate" is a more

sinister thing when it rests on the fanaticism of thousands than when

it is the mere subservience of time-servers to the sovereign; for if

the principle were to be practically established that a man may be

politically ostracised for theological heresy, the axe would be laid

to the root of a greater thing than political privilege. What the

Inquisition did for Spain, brainless bigotry might have begun to do for

England. It had become clear that the law courts would not give any

decision which struck at the freedom of the House of Commons to act as

it pleased, our constitution being thus seen to lack the safeguard set

up in the Supreme Court of the United States; though the House went

through the form of arguing its case before the judges. The value of

their decisions was seen when, after Bradlaugh took the oath before

Mr Speaker Peel, he was allowed to sit in peace though he had been

declared legally incapable of taking an oath. Evidently the principle

of legality had little remaining validity. It may be, nevertheless,

that the time is not yet come for the majority of Englishmen to realise

fully how much was saved to their heritage by Bradlaugh's long stand

against nefarious faith. The language of sincere conviction still

blends with the language of cant in calling his opinions "peculiar" or

worse; and half of those who stood beside him on the political issue

were anxious in avowing their repudiation of his doctrines and his

personality. But even in the few years between his struggle and his

death there was a change; and to say that he has not yet had his full

share of honour is only to say that his fame will be at its clearest in

the larger air of a more enlightened day.

CHAPTER IV.

CLOSING YEABS.

1886.

Admitted at last to the seat for which he had fought so long and so

hard, Bradlaugh set himself strenuously to work to make up for lost

time. With nearly every quality that goes to make a good legislator,

and with the most abundant political experience from his youth up,

he had reached his fifty-third year before he sat in his place

in Parliament by secure tenure. He had fought for that place, in

all, eighteen years--chronically during twelve of them, against

constitutional opposition; continuously through six of them, against

gross injustice. And in these last six years, unhappily, his life went

very much quicker than the years. Those who had lived by him through it

all recognised that it had made him an old man. A certain aging effect

seems to have come from the terrible attack of typhoid fever in New

York in 1875; but still in 1880 his portraits show him in his prime,

the face mature without being furrowed. In 1886 he looked far more than

ten years older. The long battle had left its dire marks.

No private member in his prime, however, went to work in the

Parliaments of 1886 with such energy. Before January was out he had

obtained leave to bring in his Land Cultivation Bill,[190] which was

backed by Mr Joseph Arch, Mr Thomas Burt, and Mr Labouchere; and he

was extorting from the officials exact details as to the Perpetual

Pensions, against which he had already for years agitated outside. In

March he obtained from the new Liberal Ministry the appointment of

a Select Committee on the subject. The debate on Mr Jesse Collings'

amendment to the Address, calling for labourers' allotments--the

amendment on which the Tory Ministry were thrown out--gave him his

first opportunity of striking a blow at the party which for him was

identified as much with tyranny in general as with tyranny towards

himself. In February he gave the first notice of his intention to raise

a question which he later pushed far--that of market rights and tolls;

his first move being to call for a return giving minute particulars

as to the state of the case in each municipal borough in England and

Wales. And in the same month he was vigorously pressing his proposal

for a Labour Bureau on the lines of that of Massachusetts--a proposal

to which the Government promptly acceded. In March he took a step

abundantly justifiable on public grounds, in moving the reduction

of the monstrous vote of £12,000 to Sir H. D. Wolff for six months'

unprofitable service abroad, and £3000 more for telegrams in connection

with his mission. And he was further able to connect another enemy,

Sir Henry Tyler, with systematic breaches of the Truck Act on the part

of the Rhymney Iron Company, of which he was a director. Bradlaugh

characterised the action of the Company as part of "an infamous system

by which poor men are defrauded of part of their earnings." The

result was a Government prosecution and the infliction of the fullest

statutory penalty. In the way of direct service to labour, he was

in the same month appointed a member of the Select Committee on the

Employers' Liability Bill, on which he worked hard and carefully. In

April came the epoch-marking Home Rule Bill, in the debate on which he

made a powerful speech in support, loudly cheered by the Home Rulers

who had so long helped to exclude him. He was emphatic against the

exclusion of the Irish members, but urged that such points should be

left for discussion in committee; and he did his best outside for the

second reading by organising a great mass meeting in St James's Hall,

presided over by Mr Labouchere, which was in its way a great success, a

multitude coming sufficient to fill the hall twice over. His own Land

Cultivation Bill came to its second reading; and his speech upon it was

well received, though he saw fit not to try to press it to a division.

Again in June, shortly before the decisive division, he delivered a

second and longer speech in support of the Home Rule Bill, to listen

to which to the end Mr Gladstone delayed his dinner; and on the

dissolution he issued an "Appeal to the Electors: Mr Gladstone or Lord

Salisbury: Which?" He had done more than justice by the people whose

representatives had most zealously done him injustice. Readers of his

journal had written to urge this on him as one reason for opposing Home

Rule. He answered: "If I cannot try to do justice to my political and

religious enemies, I am unfit to be a legislator." On the merits of the

reform he tersely observed: "Home Rule is no four-leaved shamrock, but

it is the beginning of justice."

[Footnote 190: Described in a previous chapter, p. 182.]

In the new General Election, a new excitement was given to the contest

in Northampton by the candidature of a Liberal Unionist, Mr Turner,

a leading local manufacturer, in coalition with a Conservative. His

supporters were extremely confident; but when the vote was counted the

figures stood: Labouchere, 4570; Bradlaugh, 4353; Turner, 3850; Lees,

3456. On the declaration of the poll, Mr Turner, being shouted down

by the crowd, addressed to the reporters the intimation that he "came

forward for the first time to wrest the representation of the town from

the greatest and most mischievous demagogue of the present century."

But by this time the old obloquy had considerably quieted down. At

the beginning of the year the Bishop of Peterborough, Dr Magee, had

published a review article in which, while making hostile allusion to

Bradlaugh--doubtless in recollection of old criticisms--as an Atheist

"whose name certainly neither softens nor sweetens any controversy with

which it is connected," he declared forcibly against the Parliamentary

Oath altogether. As he truly observed,

"Whatever else our present Parliamentary Oath was designed to

effect, it was never designed to keep Atheists out of Parliament. It

was, and is, strictly a political test, and for a purpose happily

quite remote from modern English politics. It is dynastic.... It

does not even ... exclude Republicans; for, should the Parliament

which imposes it decide at any time upon the ultimate abolition of

monarchy, there would then be no 'successors according to law' to

whom to be faithful.... As a political test, it is practically all

but obsolete.... It does not even incidentally and indirectly act as

a religious test, for no Atheist that we know of has ever refused to

take it."

Oddly enough, while arguing for the abolition of the Parliamentary

Oath, the Bishop proposed to "retain" the oath in courts of justice,

being apparently unaware that there it was already to some extent

optional. His opinion on the other point, however, counted for

something; and though an appeal was made to the Liberal ministry,

as it had been made to their predecessors, to prosecute Bradlaugh

afresh for sitting and voting, the ministry refused, and the matter

dropped once for all. There was also, of course, a cessation of the

attacks on him by Conservative members. One, a Mr E. H. Llewellyn, at

a Primrose League meeting early in the year, scurrilously spoke of him

as having "seemed more as if he spat upon than kissed" the Testament

in taking the oath; but for this congenial indulgence Mr Llewellyn

had to make a public apology to Bradlaugh and to the House of Commons

alike. Bradlaugh was an excessively inconvenient enemy to have at close

quarters.

No one knew this better than Lord Randolph Churchill, who was now

promoted to the leadership of the House of Commons over the head of

Sir Michael Hicks Beach. "The most bitter enemy of the Tory party,"

wrote Bradlaugh, "could hardly have planned for it greater degradation

than this leadership." One Tory journalist attributed to him, quite

falsely, a proposal to hiss Churchill on his first rising to address

the House. That was not his way of fighting. The "new leader," on his

part, was extraordinarily conciliatory. When the new Parliament met in

August, Churchill made not even a sign of wish to stand again between

Bradlaugh and the oath; and when Bradlaugh made his important motion

that the House do not assent to the usual Sessional Order prohibiting

the interference of peers in elections, his lordship actually offered

him a committee for the following year to frame another Order instead,

admitting that the existing one was habitually ignored. Bradlaugh,

however, pressed the matter to a division, when 126 members supported

him, the Liberal leaders voting with the Tory majority against him.

His object had been, as the vigilant Newdegate noted, to take the

"first step to getting rid of the House of Lords." By allowing peers

to interfere freely in elections, he proposed to strike at their

hereditary privilege. But the time for such a measure was not yet.

It was understood to be on Churchill's urging, again, that two months

afterwards the Tory Attorney-General entered a _stet processus_ in

the still outstanding appeal to the House of Lords, thus ending an

action which the Gladstone Ministry had declined to end at Bradlaugh's

request. But Bradlaugh in no way slackened his hostility on this score.

On 19th September, in a discussion on the committal of Father Fahy

for using threatening language towards magistrates, he reminded the

House how its leader had once declared in the House that the Crown

could procure the decisions it wanted from certain judges. Churchill,

entering the House later, and learning what had been stated, assured

Bradlaugh that he had been entirely mistaken, and gave the statement

an unqualified denial. On Bradlaugh saying he thought he was right,

Churchill made the curious answer: "I am sure he cannot find anywhere

a record of my having said such a thing." Bradlaugh immediately went

to consult Hansard, and not finding the passage he had expected, came

back and frankly confessed the fact to the House. But on turning

back he found that he had made an equivalent statement in his letter

to Northcote on 1st March 1884, and that Northcote, while disputing

in his reply certain of Bradlaugh's assertions, lest he should be

taken to admit them, did not dispute this. A more leisurely search

in the newspaper files cleared up part of the mystery. Churchill

had repeatedly said in effect what Bradlaugh had attributed to him.

In at least three speeches (30th April 1883; 21st February 1884;

12th June 1884) he had directly and indirectly insinuated that the

Government could get the decisions they wanted in a collusive action

against Bradlaugh by bringing it before judges who had been Liberal

Attorneys-General. What had apparently happened was that the noble

lord had struck at least one passage out of the Hansard report when,

according to custom, the proofs of his speeches were sent to him as

to other members for correction afterwards. Having done this, he felt

safe in saying that Bradlaugh "could not find anywhere a record" of

such a statement on his part. It was a mistaken confidence; and besides

publishing the newspaper extracts at the time, Bradlaugh later found an

opportunity to pay off his score with interest.

In the October of 1886, meantime, he addressed to the noble lord

an open letter of scathing comment on his policy, his tactics, his

speeches, and his character. It contained the sentence--referring to

"old English gentlemen"--"These belong to a class to which I, as well

as yourself, am a stranger--I from birth, and you from habit;" and in

reference to his lordship's language (outside) towards Mr Gladstone,

it had the passage: "He has often been generous to you--the great can

be generous. You might, in taking a leader's place, at least have for

the moment aped a leader's dignity. _Noblesse oblige_; but no such

obligation weighs on you; _où il n'y a rien le roi perd ses droits_."

Yet even after this Churchill sought to make his personal acquaintance

and disarm his resentment making repeated attempts to be introduced,

and on one occasion actually intervening with a broad compliment in a

conversation between Bradlaugh and another member in the smoking-room.

Bradlaugh bowed with the old-fashioned ceremony which he adhered to in

such cases, but would not further accept the obtruded friendship. He

had, however, passed beyond his former disposition to square accounts

with the lordling who had called his supporters the "mob, scum, and

dregs." I once heard him remark that it was pitiful to see Churchill,

with his fidgety, lawyer's-clerk manner and tactics, trying to rise to

the dignity of the leadership of the House, trying not to twist his

moustache all the time, and to listen to opponents like a statesman.

And some story he heard of an act of generosity on Churchill's part

helped further to disarm his never very vindictive hostility.

Nothing, indeed, could well surpass the magnanimity with which he put

away from him all rancour for the endless insults he had received. New

Tory members, expecting perhaps to see in him a truculent demagogue,

were disarmed on finding a genial gentleman and comrade, who bore

no malice, was excellent company, and played chess as sociably as

skilfully. As the years went on, there actually arose a sort of

enthusiasm for him among the younger Tories, more than one of whom

assured him that they deplored the treatment he had met with at

the hands of their party. Of course they did not suffer from the

embarrassment of the Liberals at the prospect that the irrepressible

Atheist, with his extraordinary gift for legislation, would possibly

have to be included in the next Liberal administration.

This feeling began to arise very rapidly among the Radicals outside.

His prompt success in securing the Labour Bureau, and in checking

the practice of truck in Scotland and England, brought him immediate

votes of thanks from labour organizations, though the press at this

stage practised against him such a boycott that at a time when he was

constantly speaking on the estimates, correspondents wrote deploring

his silence in the House. The old tactic of ostracism was not easily

unlearned; and the official Liberal journals, as the _Daily News_, for

years on end sought to suppress the fact that it was he who had brought

about the Labour Bureau. So anxious were such journals to keep him out

of sight, that when the important return moved for by him as to market

rights and tolls was issued, and had to be discussed, the _News_ dealt

with it elaborately without mentioning that it was Bradlaugh who had

obtained it.

No conspiracy, however, could suppress general knowledge of such a mass

of work as he got through, outside the House as well as inside. When it

was not sitting, he was on lecturing tours, and I find that in the last

three months of 1886, Parliament being in recess, he addressed nearly

sixty political meetings in all parts of the country, in addition to

his Secularist lecturing, which he never abandoned, though he devoted

a larger proportion of his lectures to politics than formerly. In the

House, besides working specially at his questions of truck and land

cultivation and perpetual pensions, and serving on the committee to

consider the effects of the Employers' Liability Act, he was one of

the most generally industrious of legislators. All this strain was not

for nothing, and at the end of the year we find him suffering from

erysipelas and neuritis.

1887.

In the session of 1887, however, he went to work with unslackened

energy. In a long speech delivered to a full house in the debate on

the address, he attacked the Government on their permission of illegal

truck practices, on their Egyptian policy, on their Burmese policy, and

on their Irish policy. On the resignation of Lord Randolph Churchill,

the new Commons leader, Mr W. H. Smith, continued the Tory policy of

concession to the former victim of the party; and he was granted a

Select Committee on Perpetual Pensions, himself being a member. The

point raised by him last year as to peers' interference in elections

was made the subject of investigation for another committee (of seven),

moved for by the Government, and on this too he sat. The majority

of the committee, of course, soon reported in favour of leaving the

Sessional Order unaltered, Bradlaugh and Mr Whitbread dissenting.

Meanwhile, he was continuing his attacks on the practice of truck, and

got down for discussion a Truck Act Amendment Bill in addition to the

Affirmation Bill which he had introduced when Sir John (formerly Mr

Sergeant) Simon's came to nothing. In March, too, he took an active

part with Mr Howell and Mr Labouchere in the attack on certain members

of the Corporation of London, including, and specially, his own old

enemy, Alderman Sir R. N. Fowler, for corrupt expenditure. In Fowler's

presence Bradlaugh on his part "undertook to specifically connect

the hon. baronet with the issue of City funds under conditions which

compelled the knowledge on his part that they were corruptly used for

the purpose of influencing the decisions of that House. He would prove

that up to the hilt." And again he renewed his energetic action against

the huge expenditure on Sir H. D. Wolff's mission to Cairo, a mission

which, he declared, amid Radical cheers, to be a gross Conservative

"job;" and he had the support of 146 members to his motion to quash the

vote.

The charges against the Corporation were formally heard before a Select

Committee of the House of Commons, Bradlaugh acting as prosecutor.

Fowler, without really denying the charges in the House, had described

them as "anonymous tittle-tattle;" and on the insufficiency of

this disclaimer being pointed out, one of the ministers, Lord G.

Hamilton, formally denied the charges on Fowler's behalf. Before

the Committee--consisting of Lord Hartington, Sir Joseph Bailey, Mr

Dillwyn, Mr Houldsworth, and Mr Stevenson--the statements made as to

expenditure were proved,[191] as Bradlaugh had promised, "up to the

hilt." Fourteen witnesses were examined by him; the City accounts for

five years and other documents were closely gone into; and when the

alleged payments could no longer be disputed, the defence (conducted

by Mr J. Compton Lawrence, Q.C.) took the line of arguing that the

challenged payments were within the right of the Corporation. They had

been made during a number of years by way of resisting the popular

movement for the reform of the municipal government of London. In the

words of Bradlaugh:--

[Footnote 191: See the Blue-Book, "Report London Corporation (Charges

of Malversation)," together with the Proceedings of the Committee,

Minutes of Evidence, and Appendix, Parliamentary Paper, 161, 1887. A

brief account of the matter was written by Bradlaugh for _Our Corner_,

July and August 1887, under the title, "How the City Fathers Fight."]

"£19,550, 10s. 10d. was proved to have been expended in financing

Associations such as the Metropolitan Ratepayers' Association,

Metropolitan Local Self-Government Association, Anti-One-Municipality

League, and South London Municipal Association, described by Mr

Howell as 'bogus' Associations, which were mostly started by paid

agents employed by City officials, under the direction of, and with

the knowledge of, the Special Committee; and which Associations were

used as a means of creating a fraudulent, unfair, and collusive

opposition to the proposed legislation for London municipal reform.

Improper use and malversation of funds were also shown in promoting

and carrying on collusive and fictitious charter movements in Lambeth,

Woolwich, Greenwich, and other places in the metropolis, with the

view of representing these to Parliament and to the Privy Council as

spontaneous and _bona-fide_ movements, when they were really only

intended as opposition to the Government Bill. (The fictitious nature

of the charter movement is especially illustrated by Mr Stoneham's

answer: 'When the London Government Bill was dropped, the charter

movements were let fall through by the City to a great extent.')

Improper use was further shown in paying men to attend in very large

numbers for the purpose of opposing, sometimes with violence, the

meetings in favour of the reform of the Corporation; in paying for

sham deputations, sham meetings in favour of the City, and for unfair

reports which were published in the press; in procuring signatures to

petitions," etc.

The most extraordinary thing of all was the fact that in the case of

one municipal reform meeting in 1883, at least 2000 forged tickets

had been issued, and their distribution was not obscurely traced to

Corporation officials. In regard to this matter, Fowler was shown

to have helped to evade inquiry when it was challenged at the time;

and in regard to the improper expenditure, he was shown to have

been officially cognisant; and though the Committee let off their

fellow-member as lightly as they could, he had a very bad quarter

of an hour under Bradlaugh's examination. One by one, the champions

of the religiosity of the legislature against the Atheist had been

shown to do their cause small credit in their persons. About the same

time Bradlaugh took a leading part in exposing in the House a gross

and systematic fraud in the preparation of a certain petition from

Haggerston, signatures having been forged and invented wholesale, to

the extent even of putting names of infant children and racehorses;

and this again was done for payment made by City officials. But on

Bradlaugh's side there was no subordination of the public to his

private interest; and when, in April 1887, Newdegate died in the odour

of sanctity, he displayed no vindictiveness in his comments on the

local obituary biography, which of course dealt freely with his own

name. "I am credibly informed," he wrote, "that, apart from his bigotry

against Catholics and heretics, Mr Newdegate was a kindly country

gentleman, well liked by those who knew him. I regret to learn from

his biographer that he treated the six years' harassing anxiety and

cost to myself, which he did so much to continue, as a subject for

merriment."

In respect of his legislative work he was as successful as he was

industrious. By the end of April he had got his Truck Bill into the

Committee stage; and he secured from the Government, without a blow,

the Royal Commission on Market Rights and Tolls for which he moved

in a speech of an hour's length.[192] The manner of this success was

singular. In the words of one Tory journal: "It was no secret that

the Government intended at first to oppose Mr Bradlaugh's motion,

but it gave way on receiving an intimation from a large number of

Conservative members sitting below the gangway that, if a division

took place, they would be compelled to vote with the junior member for

Northampton." So oddly had the tables been turned. Yet he had in no

way slackened his opposition to Tory policy. On the Coercion Bill he

had made three forcible speeches, and he was always pursuing ministers

with awkward questions. His success with the enemy was due simply to

the irresistible impression he created of honesty and industry and

single-mindedness. And when in May he made a merciless exposure of

Churchill on the point above alluded to, of his old imputations on

the integrity of Liberal judges, it did not appear that Conservatives

failed to enjoy the proceedings. It was in the course of the privilege

debate on the _Times'_ articles on "Parnellism and Crime." Bradlaugh

first elicited from Churchill a repudiation of one of his former

utterances, and then proceeded to quote in full the passage from

Hansard, with the now verified reference. Another challenge elicited

another denial, and yet another quotation, with the reference. They

were all ready for this occasion. "I am not responsible for Hansard,"

cried the noble lord, in much agitation; whereupon Bradlaugh added new

and sharper punishment, going on to quote yet more of the damnatory

passages from Hansard. "The noble lord," he went on, "was of opinion

in 1884 that the courts of law were not fair tribunals," whereupon

Churchill again indicated dissent. "It was perhaps," admitted

Bradlaugh, "not quite correct to say that the noble lord was of that

opinion--he only said it." And still the castigation went on, the

House punctuating it with laughter, till Churchill rose and protested

that in regard to his recent speeches on the _Times_ question he had

been utterly misrepresented. Whereupon "Mr Bradlaugh said he was not

dealing with the noble lord's views--he did not know what they were.

(Opposition cheers and laughter.) He was only giving the noble lord's

words." At the close of the speech, which as a whole was unanswerable,

Churchill rose to offer a "personal explanation" on the Hansard

business. Delivered with anxious prolixity, it was primarily to the

effect that in 1884 his speeches were "greatly compressed" in Hansard,

"as is invariably the case with ordinary members," and that the

compressed reports could not be taken as true and faithful. This gave

Bradlaugh his final opportunity.

[Footnote 192: Circulated as a pamphlet in immense numbers by the

Cobden Club, and reprinted among his speeches.]

"I accept the explanation of the noble lord [on the bearing of his

words on the _Times_ case], and I can corroborate his statements as to

the compression of his speeches, because I used at one time to hear

from him expressions which, having unguardedly repeated them without

verification, I could not find in Hansard when I went to look for

them. (Loud laughter and cheers.) The only mental difficulty I have is

to imagine how any process of compression could put words on record

which were never spoken. (Loud laughter and cheers.)"

It was as sufficient and artistic a piece of punishment as the House

had witnessed for a long time; and Bradlaugh thenceforth considered

his accounts with his former vilifier reasonably squared. Besides, in

his anxiety to propitiate his powerful opponent, Churchill immediately

afterwards declared in a letter to the _Times_ that he did not see

how Bradlaugh's Oaths Bill could with propriety be opposed by the

Conservative party, whose duty it was, by supporting and passing it, to

"secure that the Parliamentary oath in future will in all probability

only be taken by those who believe in and revere its effective

solemnity." This was written in anticipation of the action of a few

Conservatives who, rebelling against their own leaders, obstructed

the measure when it came on for discussion after other matters about

five o'clock in the morning. Sir Edward Clarke, who had zealously

resisted all previous bills of the kind, gave his support to this.

Twice over, in a House of 300, Bradlaugh had large majorities--of 91

and 104--against adjournment, but still the motions went on. At length,

having sat in the House for eleven hours, he gave way, an act for which

some outsiders thought fit to blame him. Some journals, however, took

the opportunity to speak of him, on the merits of the question, with

a civility they had never before seen occasion to show him. Others

made use of the occasion to point out how fully it proved the utter

dishonesty of most of the previous Tory opposition to Bradlaugh. Some

of the details in the debate gave dramatic corroboration to this view.

Colonel Hughes had stood forward as one of the representatives of

religion; on which Mr Healy--himself once in that galley--observed that

"it was to be hoped Christianity would not be defended by a gentleman

who had been scheduled for bribery."

While the Oaths Bill was thus delayed, Bradlaugh contrived by

incessant vigilance to get the Truck Bill through Committee in July.

He confessed that if he had known beforehand the enormous labour such

a Bill involved--"the receiving deputations, the large explanatory

correspondence, the huge mass of suggested amendments, the objections

from various interests to each amendment, and the utter impossibility

of conciliating or satisfying the various sections, some friendly, some

hostile, some well-meaning but impracticable"--he might have shrunk

from the task. For twenty-seven nights he had watched till the morning

hours on the chance of his Bill being reached, and when all was done

it seemed for a time as if the Upper House, in its customary manner,

would wreck everything. Their lordships' first "amendments" were

insufferable, and were sent back to them, the House of Commons backing

up Bradlaugh with vigour. Finally their lordships agreed to limit their

amendments to a few which, while of course doing harm, did not affect

the main work of the Bill, and though some Irish and other members

desired to reject it on the score of these, the measure was at length

passed.