He had thus in one session carried an important Act, made considerable

progress with another, and obtained a Select Committee on Perpetual

Pensions and a Royal Commission on Market Rights and Tolls, apart from

the Committee appointed by the Government on his former initiative to

discuss the action of peers in elections. In the Committee on Pensions

his report was unanimously adopted, barring the clauses which dealt

with certain payments to the Duchy of Cornwall--in other words, to

the Prince of Wales. He had further prosecuted the Corporation of

London before yet another Select Committee of the House, effectively

damaging one of his enemies in the process, as he had in the previous

year secured the prosecution of another for breach of the law in

his capacity of a company director. He had seen yet another enemy,

Churchill, deposed from his place of pride, and had incidentally

overthrown him in debate. All the while he was doing hard work on the

Employers' Liability Committee besides speaking often on the Estimates

and on the Coercion Bill, putting an ever-increasing number of solid

questions to ministers on grievances submitted to him, many of which

were redressed, and in particular pertinaciously pursuing the Indian

Office as to certain underhand dealings in the matter of the ruby mines

of Burmah. No other member's work could compare with it all; and the

press decided that "Bradlaugh's Session" was the proper summary of the

Parliamentary season. But, of course, such success evoked jealousy

no less than tribute. In the carrying of the Truck Act he had not a

little experience of the jealousy of labour leaders and others; and

while the official Liberal press still partly boycotted him, the

Socialist press made a point of belittling or perverting everything

he did. Despite his continuous attacks on Tory policy, his Truck Bill

was declared to owe its success to Government adoption. The Socialist

_Reynolds_ declared that he did little or nothing in Parliament; while

the Tory _England_ protested that he spoke far too often. As a matter

of fact, he had made some sixty-five speeches up to Whitsuntide,

thirteen of them against Coercion. But the circumstance which made

his Parliamentary industry absolutely unique was that it was carried

on alongside of a continuous course of Sunday lecturing, with special

attendances at week-day demonstrations thrown in. When the Sunday

lectures were in London the strain was comparatively light, as only

two were given in the day at the Hall of Science; but in the provinces

it is the Secularist practice to have three discourses on the Sunday

when a London lecturer comes, and the physical strain of this, it need

not be said, is heavy. Thus for Bradlaugh the two days of the week

which other members of Parliament could give to rest and recreation

were oftenest simply days of travelling and extra speaking. Now and

then he could get a Saturday's pike-fishing on the Lea or on a Thames

backwater; once or twice in the year he could even run down to Loch

Long for two or three days of the very much more bracing fishing there.

Even the holiday became a source of fresh work, for he took up with

his usual energy the case of the pollution of Loch Long by Glasgow

sewage; and it was due to his persistent pressure that the nuisance

was at length stopped. He thus made a rich return for the measure of

rest and strength gained from his days of fishing--a gain which was at

times wonderful. But though his powers of recuperation were great, the

rest-days were far too few; the balance was always heavily on the side

of overwork; and so his intimates now saw him year after year showing

ever heavier traces of the overwhelming strain of his life. Whether he

got to bed early or in the late morning hours, he was always up and at

work before eight, attacking his great pile of correspondence, which

alone would have seemed to many men to supply a good day's work. Every

day's post brought him on an average a round dozen of grievances to

be submitted to Parliament, and in every case which he thought worth

attention he made careful investigation, always declining to trouble

Ministers without good grounds. Then there were the continual letters

from poor men of all denominations asking for legal advice gratis--a

kind of request he never refused. Yet with it all he found time to

write for his journal; and his articles and speeches at this time are

as pregnant and efficient as any he ever penned or spoke. Among other

things he wrote a weighty little pamphlet: "The Channel Tunnel: Ought

the Democracy to Oppose or Support it?" which was widely circulated

as the strongest possible popular plea for the undertaking. When next

the public is effectively challenged for a vote on that question, it

will probably be found that there has been a great transformation of

opinion; and not a little of the credit will be due to his pleading.

Of the extent of his influence in this and other ways the average

metropolitan reader never had any accurate idea, between the grossly

unjust attacks of Socialists on the one hand, and the boycotting of the

Liberal press on the other. Thus we find him delivering in Birmingham,

in October 1887, a great fighting speech on the party situation, of

which no report whatever appears in the London papers. It dealt with

the question raised by Mr Chamberlain, "Is a National Party possible?"

and the answer it gave was a determined and uncompromising attack

on the Unionist coalition, this at a time when Liberals and some

Radicals were insinuating that he was ingratiating himself in the Tory

counsels. This was a type of dozens of provincial addresses delivered

by him every year, some of them at immense open-air demonstrations of

miners, who always invited him to their great gatherings. Of all this

activity the London press revealed hardly a trace, any more than of

his hundreds of Sunday lectures every year, of which one or two out of

every three were devoted to politics. It is safe to say that no other

English politician of his time spoke publicly to such numbers of his

fellow-countrymen in the course of each year.

A striking illustration of the new animus against him among "advanced"

propagandists came up on the occasion of the deplorable Trafalgar

Square episode of 13th November 1887. The Socialist press and some

Radical journals sedulously circulated the intimation that "somehow or

other Mr Bradlaugh was very conspicuous by his absence," while pointing

to his old proceedings in similar crises. He was actually lecturing at

the time at West Hartlepool, in fulfilment of an engagement made months

before; and next day he was at Hull. On his return he contributed to

the _Pall Mall Gazette_ a careful statement of the law on the point of

the use of Trafalgar Square, criticising and condemning the action of

the authorities, and he followed this up with further protests, while

advising the Radical M.P.'s concerned to fight out the case at law,

and begging those who trusted him to await such legal settlement. Yet

several times since his death it has been stated in the press that he

exhumed a forgotten law which entitled the Home Secretary to prevent

meetings in the Square. The laws he cited were all to the contrary

effect, and were well enough known to those officially concerned;

the point having been raised, as above mentioned, over one of his

own Trafalgar Square demonstrations a few years before. And when Mr

Cunninghame Graham and Mr Burns were prosecuted, he gave evidence on

their behalf, making a hasty and difficult journey across the country

from Leek to London on a telegraphic summons to arrive in time when

they were tried at the Old Bailey.

A paragraph which he published in his journal in this connection

will serve to mark the degree of political severance which, with no

diminution of mutual regard, had arisen between him and his long-tried

colleague and partner, Mrs Besant. It ran:--

"As I have on most serious matters of principle recently differed

very widely from my brave and loyal co-worker, and as that difference

has been regrettably emphasized by her resignation of her editorial

functions on this journal, it is the more necessary that I should

say how thoroughly I approve, and how grateful I am to her for, her

conduct in not only obtaining bail and providing legal assistance for

the helpless unfortunates in the hands of the police, but also for her

daily personal attendance and wise conduct at the police-stations and

police-courts, where she has done so much to abate harsh treatment

on the one hand and rash folly on the other. While I should not have

marked this out as fitting woman's work, especially in the recent very

inclement weather, I desire to record my view that it has been bravely

done, well done, and most usefully done; and I wish to mark this the

more emphatically as my views and those of Mrs Besant seem more wide

apart than I could have deemed possible on many of the points of

principle underlying what is every day growing into a more serious

struggle."

The severance spoken of had arisen over Mrs Besant's adoption of

Socialist principles, a change of attitude on her part which began

about 1885, and soon went the length of a somewhat extreme propaganda,

afterwards modified in common with the general tone of the Fabian

Society, of which she had speedily become the most active member. The

joint editorship had now become a practical difficulty as well as a

source of complaint among readers; and in October 1887 it was amicably

ended, Mrs Besant continuing to act as sub-editor and contributor. She

had fought beside Bradlaugh and for him loyally and well, and though

the suddenness and vehemence of her new departure had startled and

troubled him, his friendship, as the above paragraph shows, had in no

way weakened. He was not the man to break a tie for even a serious

difference in opinion; though he was also the last man to do what

some Socialists contemptibly accused him of doing--arrange that his

colleague should take one line and he another in order to promote the

circulation of his journal. He did for Socialists what he did for

everybody who got into legal trouble on political grounds, and he

gave Mrs Besant ample assistance in fighting the case of those who

were arrested by the police for open-air propaganda. The most serious

change of position on Mrs Besant's part, her conversion to Madame

Blavatsky's "Theosophy," was soon to come. Even when that came, in

the following year, he neither withdrew his friendship nor asked her

to cease contributing to the _Reformer_; but, coming after political

differences, the new and deep division of opinion undoubtedly pained

and depressed him. He was to find, as so many have found, that when

success comes something is sure to go which leaves success a different

thing from what was dreamt of.

1888.

The first important task of Bradlaugh on the re-assembling of

Parliament was to fight this cause of the right of public meeting

in Trafalgar Square. It had been badly enough managed by others. In

January he wrote:--

"The conviction of Messrs Cunninghame Graham and Burns for unlawful

assembly is, I fear, in great part due to the foolishly boastful

evidence of Mr Hyndman and Mr Tims. If the first had been a Crown

witness, his evidence on cross-examination could not have been more

mischievous to the accused, on the count on which a verdict was found

against them; and the incautious replies of Mr Tims to the counsel for

the Crown were almost as fatal."

The Government on their part had carried adroitness to the point of

cowardice, refusing to arrest Mrs Besant when she sought to have a

legal trial on the merits of the right of meeting. The effect of it all

was that not only the Liberal leaders, but such journals as the _Daily

Chronicle_ and the _Daily News_, took the line of deprecating any

further public meetings in the Square. Bradlaugh, standing firmly to

the claim of right, commented gravely on the promoters of the meeting

for "bringing together a huge mass of people whom nobody was prepared

to lead or to control;" and he expressed his regret that Mr Saunders, a

prosecution against whom was laid and then departed from, should have

let the legal question drop. Before the assembling of the House certain

metropolitan members, learning that Bradlaugh was determined to raise

the question by an amendment on the Address, took the unworthy line of

protesting that, as a metropolitan matter, it was no business of his.

He offered to leave it to Sir Charles Russell, as the most capable of

dealing with it. Sir Charles promptly replied that no one could handle

it better than Bradlaugh, but undertook the moving of the leading

amendment. In addition to such difficulties Bradlaugh had the trouble

of opposing the action of Mrs Besant on the newly-founded Law and

Liberty League, promoted by herself and Mr Stead, with its "Ironside

Circles," and other risky arrangements for meeting force with force.

When the House met, Bradlaugh took occasion, before the debates began,

to make a personal statement on a matter that had of late frequently

come before the public. In February of 1886 he had offered in the

House to show that large sums of money, excessive for such a purpose,

had been supplied by leading Conservatives of both Houses of Parliament

for the promotion of a Trafalgar Square demonstration for "Fair Trade,"

organised by a Tory agitator named Peters, which had culminated in a

riot. Peters had at the time blusterously denied this, but had declined

Bradlaugh's challenge to a formal investigation before an arbitrator

as at _nisi prius_. In the recent prosecution of Messrs Burns and

Cunninghame Graham at Bow Street, Bradlaugh had been pressed by the

Crown Counsel on this point, had reaffirmed his statement, and had

added that one of the cheques, which he had seen and was prepared to

trace, was from Lord Salisbury. This statement was first denied by

Lord Salisbury in a letter to the _Times_ (2nd December), and was

afterwards characterised as wilful perjury in a published letter from

his secretary to one Kelly, a colleague of Peters. On the first denial

Bradlaugh promptly offered to have the matter investigated before a

Committee of the House of Commons. This offer Lord Salisbury neither

accepted nor declined. Bradlaugh now asked the Government to agree to

a Select Committee of Investigation, pointing out that he lay under

an imputation of perjury from the Prime Minister on a statement which

he had made in Parliament. An action for libel, however, had been

already begun against Bradlaugh by Peters; and the Ministry, after

waiting a few days, answered that the matter was not a proper one

for a Select Committee, especially as a lawsuit on it was pending.

Bradlaugh, however, pointed out that the action in question could

not raise the real issue, and offered to raise it if Lord Salisbury

would acknowledge the publication of the letter to Kelly, signed by

his secretary. This acknowledgment he sought to obtain by letter, but

after delay the noble lord took the singular course of declining to

accept legal responsibility for the publication of the letter, as he

had not consented to it. When, however, Bradlaugh read this letter

of disclaimer in the House, Lord Salisbury sent him a secretarial

letter (22nd February) referring to the original letter to the _Times_

over his lordship's own signature (in which the truth of Bradlaugh's

statement had been denied without charging perjury), and admitting his

lordship's legal responsibility for that. That letter, however, was

not actionable, and Bradlaugh had replied to it at the time, as he now

pointed out. Lord Salisbury then wrote (25th February), repeating that

he could accept no responsibility for his letter to Kelly, concerning

whom he made the curious statement that he, too, was affected by

Bradlaugh's false and injurious charges, though Bradlaugh had never

mentioned Kelly's name in the matter. His lordship, however, professed

his readiness to facilitate a legal investigation of Bradlaugh's

statements, which his lordship inaccurately professed to reproduce.

Bradlaugh, protesting against his lordship's tolerating the publication

of the charge of perjury, and never once apologising for it, answered

that he preferred to have the charge stated in the words in which he

made it, and in none other. No reply was offered, and the matter was

left to be settled by Peters' action for libel.

The debate on the Trafalgar Square question did not come on for a week

or two, and in the meantime one notable episode occurred over a remark

made by Bradlaugh in the discussion on an amendment to the Address

concerning the Scotch Crofters. The report runs:--

"Mr Bradlaugh said he understood the Chief Secretary to say that

the cause of the evil they had to deal with in the Highlands was

over-population, and that the sole remedy for this difficulty was

emigration. He also understood the right hon. gentleman to denounce

the reckless increase of population in that district during the last

forty or fifty years. He felt some astonishment that the right hon.

gentleman should put forward such an argument, when he remembered

that the right hon. gentleman, and those who sat around him, tried

before all England to make him appear as one of the most immoral men

alive, because he had tried to teach the people for the last quarter

of a century these very evils of over-population, and these very

difficulties of their condition connected with reckless increase. It

was astounding to hear from the other side such a doctrine put forward

to be supported, because, when urged by him in olden times, it had

made him the mark for some of the most wicked language that one man

could use against another.

"Mr A. J. Balfour: I never in my life used any such language against

the hon. gentleman; never, never. (Cheers.)

"Mr Bradlaugh said that, at any rate, the important party of which the

right hon. gentleman was then a prominent member, flooded the country

with literature containing such attacks, without then one word of

repudiation from the right hon. gentleman. But he would not discuss

the personal position of the matter further. The sole remedy for the

existing distress, according to hon. members opposite, was emigration.

But how were they going to apply it? Was the State to undertake the

emigration? Were the people to be sent away by force, and to what

lands were they to go? In every case they would have to struggle for

existence against hostile life-conditions, extremes of heat and cold,

hard for starving men to hear. Everywhere they would be confronted

with the labour struggle, for we were no longer the sole, or even the

principal, colonising people; masses of Germans and other thrifty

colonising races were now found in every distant land. Of course,

emigration resulted in a few successes, and of these much was heard;

but nothing was said about the many miserable failures. Medical men in

America and Canada could tell many heart-rending stories of madness

supervening on the home-sickness that embittered the emigrant's life.

There was no country where pauper emigration would be welcomed. State

emigration, if at all, must include on a large scale other distressed

subjects. This was impracticable. Emigration of charity was mockery

save to the veriest few. No; emigration ought not to be thought of as

a remedy until other means had been tried, until the unjust conditions

which hampered the poor, and which had been artificially created by

the class to which the hon. gentlemen opposite belonged, had been

swept away. ('Hear. hear.')"

Thus again did Bradlaugh prove that his Neo-Malthusianism was anything

but an argument against the political improvement of the lot of the

people. The emphatic declaration of Mr Balfour may be held to class him

with Mr John Morley, Mr Leonard Courtney, and the late Lord Derby, as a

believer in the importance of restriction of population; but it is not

on record that he, any more than they, has sought to communicate his

belief to the public or his party; and it is certain that, as Bradlaugh

remarked, he never said a word in deprecation of the attacks of his

fellow-Tories on Bradlaugh as a Neo-Malthusian at a time when such

attacks were a main means of keeping him out of his seat.

When at length the Trafalgar Square question was reached (1st March),

being raised in a masterly speech by Sir Charles Russell, Bradlaugh

followed with one perhaps not less effective, which, lasting till

midnight, had to be continued on the following evening. It included a

sharp indictment of the conduct of the police, and a broad suggestion

that the authorities seemed to have made use of _agents provocateurs_;

and it made short work of the official pretence that the Square was

Crown property, as having been constituted out of the King's Mews--a

statement on a par with Mr Burdett Coutts' citation of the old Act

against certain meetings near Parliament without the all-essential

clause specifying the kind of meetings forbidden. The King's Mews,

Bradlaugh pointed out, had formed only a very small part of the ground,

while the rest had been bought and paid for with public money. He

challenged an investigation of the conduct of the police, and wound

up with an earnest appeal to "those who were elected as Liberals" to

resist the tyrannous policy of the Government. The Home Secretary

was stung into promising an investigation of the charges against

the police; but it is matter of history that the Liberal leaders

homologated the action of the Tory Ministry.

A few weeks afterwards (21st March) came the decisive struggle on

Bradlaugh's Affirmation Bill (otherwise "Oaths Bill"), which he had

failed to force through in the previous session. He moved the second

reading in a tersely argued and conciliatory speech; and though some

Conservatives, as Mr Stanley Leighton and Mr De Lisle (Catholic), made

foolish speeches against it, the great majority of the House was with

him. One member, Mr Gedge, made a success of absurdity by arguing

that the promoters of the Bill had defined an Atheist as one "_on

whom conscience had no binding effect_," and this nonsensical phrase

he repeated again and again without recognising its nature, entirely

failing at the same time to see the point that the "definition" he

meant to quote was that given by a court of law, and not by the

promoters of the Bill at all. At length, the second reading was carried

over the amendment (which proposed a Royal Commission) by 247 votes

to 137. On the substantive motion being put that the Bill be read a

second time, obstruction was attempted, which Bradlaugh met by moving

the closure. On this he had 334 votes to 50; and the second reading was

then formally carried by 250 votes to 100, a majority which surpassed

his most sanguine expectations.

To secure the passage of the measure, however, he had to meet the old

Christian plea that the permission to affirm--which his Bill gave alike

to witnesses, jurors, officials, and members of Parliament, in Scotland

and Ireland as well as England--should not be given to believing

Christians who, having no conscientious objections to swearing, might

seek to evade it because they felt freer to lie on affirmation than on

oath. This was urged on the Conservative side as a concession essential

to acceptance of the Bill, and Bradlaugh consented to make the

provision in Committee. No Liberal opposed; but trouble was to arise

later in the matter.

Months after Bradlaugh's undertaking had been given, and after he had

put down the promised amendment, some leading Liberal members, who

had not before made any protest, raised a strong objection to the

concession made, inasmuch as it placed upon every one desiring to

affirm the necessity of avowing whether he objected to the oath on

religious grounds, or as having no religious opinion. There ought,

these members argued, to be no questioning whatever as to reasons.

This was a perfectly reasonable objection to make on principle; but

it ignored the fact that only by making concessions to the Christian

side, to meet the case of superstitious and dishonest Christians, could

any relieving measure be carried at all; and it was brought forward

surprisingly late in the day. It is not clear, further, that the

objectors realised what the amendment actually did, for they protested

that while it was all right for Freethinkers, it put a stigma on those

who were not prepared to say they had no religious beliefs. The plain

answer to this was that such persons, if they objected to an oath, had

only to say it was inconsistent with their religious belief. Although

the objectors included such able heads as Mr E. Robertson and Dr W.

A. Hunter, it must be said that their opposition was not justified by

their arguments. It was less difficult to follow the complaint of Mr

J. A. Picton, who said he would have no relief from the Bill, inasmuch

as he was not without religious belief, but "regarded oath-taking as

a humiliating and barbarous custom." In that case, however, Mr Picton

might with perfect propriety say that oath-taking was inconsistent with

his religious belief. Further, though it is quite fair for Agnostics,

Theists, and others to protest that they ought not to be asked for

any account of their opinions in a court of justice, it was less than

fair for them to propose to leave without any relief whatever the

Freethinking jurors who were liable to much worse odium and annoyance

than is involved in saying that the oath is inconsistent with one's

religious belief; the witnesses who in Scotland could not affirm on

any condition whatever, and in England could only affirm on answering

a grossly invidious question; and the members of Parliament who had to

take the oath while very much disliking it. With the single exception

of Dr Hunter, none of the Liberal objectors to the added clause had

made any fight against oaths; the whole brunt of the battle had been

left to the Freethinkers. Yet some of those objectors, who had not

specially moved a finger for any reform whatever, were now prepared to

throw over the measure. Mr John Morley, who had voted for the second

reading after hearing Bradlaugh's undertaking to insert the qualifying

clause, now made some heated remarks against it, which Bradlaugh dryly

characterised as "not very philosophic." They certainly came ill from

the editor who had deprecated Bradlaugh's willingness to take any oath.

By dint of more forcible remonstrances with other members in the lobby,

Bradlaugh secured a majority of 87 votes for the third reading, the

figures being 147 to 60. Many of the Liberal objectors, recognising

that to vote with the Noes, who were mostly bigots, would be to put

themselves in a false position, abstained from voting; and of the 147

in the majority, 92 were Liberals.

The trouble, however, was not yet over. The "Liberal and Radical Union"

of Northampton passed by a majority a resolution complaining that the

value of the Bill was taken away by the amendment; and some Liberal

journals accused Bradlaugh of giving away the principle of religious

equality by agreeing to the imposition of "a new test." He met these

criticisms in a very temperate letter "To Liberal Editors in general,

and the Editor of the _South Wales Daily News_ in particular," the

latter journal having been one of those which had been most just to

him throughout his struggle. The editor replied, acknowledging the

courtesy of the criticism, and making his own less extravagant, but

making the extraordinary blunder of alleging that even then any member

of Parliament could affirm on the ground that oath-taking was contrary

to his religious belief--this while avowing that he only dealt with the

measure as regarded the Parliamentary oath. His main argument was that

there were many people who detested the oath, but could not say it was

condemned by their religious belief; and on the score of his measure

not relieving such persons, Bradlaugh was pronounced "ungenerous." The

truth was that he had done his best to make affirmation absolutely

unconditional, but could only carry his Bill at all by making it

conditional on the giving of a reason. He had done all he could for

all classes of objectors, and he rightly thought it better to relieve

those who suffered most than to secure no relief at all. The further

relief claimed by believers should be demanded by them from their

fellow-believers. The rational course, clearly, is to abolish oaths

altogether, and this Bradlaugh would gladly have done; but it is

neither rational nor candid to talk as if this or even a somewhat

less measure of reform could possibly be secured by him within two

years of his admission to Parliament after a desperate struggle with a

majority who stood for the grossest irrationality and injustice. Those

who condemned him ought in consistency and decency to have begun an

agitation either for making affirmation unconditional--a course which

would still leave some people open to annoyance--or for the entire

abolition of oaths. Yet, after six years have elapsed, there is still

no word of any such movement. It is the old story of the half-way

people leaving all the stress of the fighting to the more advanced.

These may be permitted to say that it is a little too much to put

on avowed Freethinkers, fighting for bare rights under all sorts of

calumny and ostracism, the burden of securing an effortless immunity

for those who all along stood at best in the rear-guard, if they did

anything in the matter at all.

Close on the heels of the second reading of the Affirmation Bill

(March) came the debate on the report of the Perpetual Pensions

Committee, on which he moved a resolution that steps should be taken

by the Government to give effect to the Committee's recommendations.

He had a Tory seconder, Mr Louis Jennings; and the debate included a

friendly speech, with an acceptable amendment, from Mr W. H. Smith,

and a very interesting speech from Gladstone; whereafter the amendment

(amended) was incorporated, and the Government stood pledged to

"determine" all hereditary pensions with due regard to justice and

economy, and to revise the pension system in general. In May, Bradlaugh

again (as told in the chapter above, on his "Political Doctrine and

Work") pressed his resolution as to the expediency of Compulsory

Cultivation of Waste Lands, only to see the House counted out after

his seconder (Mr Munro Ferguson) and the mover of an amendment had

spoken. He was not to succeed alike in everything. Later in May he

had an unpleasant experience in respect of the Government's breach of

faith over his motion of a new Rule, to the effect that on a new member

presenting himself in due form, the Speaker should forthwith call him

to the table. Mr Smith agreed to accept the motion as an "amendment

to going into Supply," on its being amended by the clause "unless the

House otherwise resolve," which Bradlaugh was advised was a harmless

provision; but when, on the pressure of Sir Henry James (who in the

Courts had argued for the House's right to "resolve" to an extent to

which Bradlaugh's clause would not allow) and others, he withdrew the

clause, the Government threw over the whole motion, though nobody

objected to the withdrawal, and the Unionists who had urged the

withdrawal of the clause left the House without voting on the motion.

It was accordingly rejected by 180 votes to 152.

His main undertaking for 1888, however, succeeded finally, to a marvel.

In the House of Lords, the Affirmation Bill might have been held to

run considerable risk; but singularly enough, though amendments were

talked of, none were pushed, and the Bill passed its third reading

(December 1888) absolutely unchanged. In the absence of Lord Herschell,

it was taken charge of by Earl Spencer and Lord Coleridge; but what

was no less important, it was endorsed by the Archbishop of Canterbury

as a desirable measure. As usual, the Church took credit for lending

itself to a reform which it had violently resisted. Outsiders were

left asking which policy had been the more insincere--the old outcry

against all Affirmation Bills or the new pretence of welcoming one. The

Lord Chancellor, who, as Sir Hardinge Giffard, had so often opposed

Bradlaugh and all his works, was more true to his antecedents, and

confessed his jealousy and dislike of the measure, while grudgingly

abstaining from trying to defeat it. To Lord Esher, who as a judge had

always administered the law as to oaths dead against him, but who now

helped the Affirmation Bill through the Upper House, Bradlaugh tendered

grave and chivalrous thanks in his journal, adding that none were

necessary in the case of the Lord Chancellor.

While the Affirmation Bill was on its way the libel action by Peters

was heard and decided. Before it came on, the editor of the _St

Stephen's Review_ (Mr Allison), who had made a libellous attack on

Bradlaugh in respect of the case, was on Bradlaugh's suit tried before

Justices Manisty and Hawkins, and submitting himself apologetically to

the Court (March 22nd), was let off with a fine of £20 and full costs

for his contempt of Court, Mr Justice Hawkins observing that he "very

much doubted whether such a fine was an adequate punishment for so

gross a contempt. He did not think he had ever seen a worse attempt to

affect the administration of justice." The judge added some no less

forcible remarks on Mr Allison's explanation that he had made his

attack "to advance the interests of the Conservative cause." But that

principle was destined to have a still more remarkable illustration

within the law courts themselves, when the libel suit was tried

(April 18th) before Mr Baron Huddleston and a special jury. If the

action of Peters for libel, in inception and upshot, be not the most

extraordinary libel case of modern times, it is only because the judge

who tried it gave a no less extraordinary turn to another libel case

which came before him eighteen months later. Peters' contention was,

in brief, that Bradlaugh had libelled him by stating that he got money

from leading Conservatives, including Lord Salisbury, for the promotion

of a "Fair Trade" demonstration in Trafalgar Square. His counsel, Mr

Lockwood, argued that "if Mr Peters was doing what Mr Bradlaugh accused

him of, then Mr Peters was doing a very corrupt thing"--a plea only

intelligible as resting on the fact that Peters was the secretary of

the "Workmen's National Association for the Abolition of Foreign Sugar

Bounties," and as implying that it would be corruption on the part

of such a Society to take money from a lord. The evidence led was to

the effect that Lord Salisbury had given money, not to Peters, but to

Kelly, who was the _fidus Achates_ of Peters, but was also secretary to

the "Riverside Labourers' Association." Both had for years been known

to Lord Salisbury in connection with the sugar protection movement.

Kelly had gone down to Hatfield and seen Mr Gunton, the secretary, and

in consequence of that interview had sent a letter to Lord Salisbury

explaining that money was wanted to give a piece of beef each to 120

of "our best men at Christmas." The said best men were "all fathers

of families," and "had never been in receipt of parochial relief."

Lord Salisbury, who gave evidence, remembered getting this letter

and sending Kelly a cheque for £25; but had no recollection of any

talk with Mr Gunton as to Kelly's previous visit to Hatfield, in

consequence of which the letter was sent. He thought it unlikely that

Kelly would have seen Mr Gunton in that way, but confessed his error

when shown that Kelly's letter to him actually mentioned the interview.

The landlord of a temperance hotel, which was the headquarters of

Peters' and Kelly's activities, testified to having spent this money

on provisions, which he distributed to "needy working men," all save

a small balance, which was otherwise distributed. He kept no books.

Peters was on the committee of distribution.

Now, granting that the money had been honestly spent in the way

alleged, there was clearly no libel on Peters in saying that the money

had been sent him to promote the Trafalgar Square demonstration.

There would be no wrongdoing in getting money from any one for such

a purpose. He declared in his evidence that Lord Salisbury had never

given him anything--"nothing, only his friendship." The buffoonery

of the plaintiff's evidence, which kept the audience in chronic

laughter, was not more remarkable than the bluster of his statements

as to his accounts. Never was a demonstration apparently got up with

a more enthusiastic zeal by working-men promoters, or with a more

simple-minded financial reliance on Providence. Only £4 had been spent

on the demonstration--"to obtain bands and banners." What the placards

had cost witness could not say; he could not even say whether they had

been paid for. The evidence of his colleague, Kelly, was hardly less

edifying. He had been one of those who had received Corporation money

to get up meetings against municipal reform.

Bradlaugh's defence was that even on the evidence there was no libel.

When Baron Huddleston interrupted him to suggest that he should

apologise, he answered that he was ready to do so as regarded Lord

Salisbury, but he could not deal with the rest of the case on those

lines. On the evidence led he was bound to admit that he had been

inaccurate as regarded Lord Salisbury's cheque; but his statement had

been wider than that, and neither in general nor in particular had it

been of the nature of a libel. Further, he had spoken in good faith

and on distinct evidence. Peters had on pressure admitted receiving

subscriptions from persons outside his Association; and Peters had

refused the investigation originally invited in 1886, when the other

facts could have been better traced. And Bradlaugh had led evidence as

to the receipt by Peters of such cheques, two of which had been shown

to him.

In pleading his case, Bradlaugh perhaps made the mistake of being too

concise in putting to the jury the point that on any view of the facts

no libel had been committed. Baron Huddleston was more circumspect.

He turned affably to the jury, and in the most intimate manner laid

before them his view that Bradlaugh had directly or indirectly accused

Peters of getting up "bogus" meetings--a statement which Bradlaugh had

distinctly repudiated, and which was entirely wide of the facts and

the evidence. The whole drift of Bradlaugh's charge, as he stated, was

"that the Conservative party were playing with edged tools in assisting

any such meetings." As the summing-up went on, indeed, it became clear

that Baron Huddleston felt this also, and that in his view there had

been a "libellous" statement against Lord Salisbury, who, however,

was not the suitor in the action. On the point of law he made no

intelligible attempt to rebut Bradlaugh's plea that the statement sued

on was in no sense a libel; but he thoughtfully suggested to the jury,

with regard to the evidence of a witness called by Bradlaugh, that

they could consider what value should be put on the evidence of a man

who objected to take the oath. He further took much pains to impress

on the jury that "a man could never be allowed to say things against a

man, and then, when he found that they were false, to say he was very

sorry, but he honestly believed them true. Such a thing would never

do." On this instruction the jury found a verdict for Peters, with £300

damages. And yet in the following year (November 1889), when Mrs Besant

sued the Rev. Mr Hoskyns for libelling her, during her School Board

candidature, in a circular which had the statement: "A Freethinker thus

describes the practical outcome of her teaching: 'Chastity is a crime;

unbridled sensuality is a virtue,'" the same judge hardily instructed

the jury that "the question was not whether Mrs Besant's books were

obscene," but as to "the defendant's honesty of belief at the time he

had published the handbills." He himself became conscious as he went on

of the iniquity of this instruction, and proceeded to cite and vilify

passages from Mrs Besant's works, thus doing everything in his power to

prejudice the jury on the real issue. But in the end, while professing

to put to them the separate issues of publication, libel, and truth

in fact, he added the issue: "If untrue, _then did the defendant when

he published it honestly and reasonably believe it to be true_, and

that it was his duty to publish it, and did he do so without malice?"

And yet again he urged that even if the libel were found untrue, "they

would have to say whether the defendant had been guilty of _mala fides_

in the sense he had explained." His own obtruded opinion was that a

priest might justifiably issue such a circular to his parishioners.

Thus he laid down for the trial of Mrs Besant's action against a

priest the exactly opposite principle to that which he laid down in

Peters' action against Bradlaugh. The priest was now adjudged free

to do what the judge had said "would never do." The priest confessed

in the witness-box that he had not read any of Mrs Besant's books

when he issued his circular. He had availed himself of the libel of

a pseudonymous scoundrel, making no attempt to ascertain its truth

Bradlaugh in his statement as to the Fair Trade demonstration had

spoken on the actual evidence of cheques which he saw, and on his

knowledge of the habitual co-operation of Peters and Kelly. But the

Conservative judge contrived to find the priest right and Bradlaugh

wrong. And it is on the strength of a verdict thus procured that

Bradlaugh has since been spoken of as "a convicted libeller."

The view taken of the case by Bradlaugh's fellow-members of Parliament

was shown by their instantly getting up a subscription to pay the

damages and costs in which he had been mulcted; and the view taken by

the legal profession may be gathered from the following verses, which

appeared in the _Star_:--

"HALVES.

(AN HISTORICAL POEM.)

DECEMBER, 1885.

Take this cheque, my gentle Kelly,

Fill our starving London's belly:

Hie thee down with dearest Peters

To the lowly primrose eaters;

Tell the unemployed refiners

Cecil sends them of his shiners;

Let each toilworn Tory striver

Batten on this twenty-fiver.

Spread my bounty

Through the county;

But my right hand must not know

What my left hand doth; and so,

If thou value my attention,

Full details must thou not mention.

FEBRUARY, 1886.

Riots! whew! too bad of Kelly.

I must ask him what the---- Well, he

Can't at least pretend that I

Had any finger in this pie.

APRIL, 1888.

Halves, Peters, halves! Honour 'mongst _us_, my sonny;

Had I but tipt the wink a year ago,

_You_ might have gone and whistled for your money,

And _my_ straightforwardness been spared a blow.

I was ashamed of giving you the cash:

You were ashamed of getting it from me

Three hundred is the value of that splash

On our fair fame, unspotted previouslee.

Remember, sonny, when your freethought flesher

Showed Charles your name and mine upon that cheque,

Had I owned up, I think you must confess your

Foot would not now have been on Charles's neck.

So halves, my Peters:--nay, I crave not coin:

To touch the brass would not befit my station:

I only ask that Kelly you'll rejoin,

And pay your debt in Tory agitation."

This, unfortunately, was not the only libel suit forced upon Bradlaugh

during the year. He had himself to raise another, against a gang of

enemies who had laid their heads together to produce a so-called

"Life" of him, which was but a tissue of the most malignant libel from

beginning to end. It attacked his daughters as well as himself, and was

so flagrantly malicious that no legal defence was possible. The nominal

author was one Charles R. Mackay, and the nominal publisher was one

Gunn--a name which was afterwards admitted by Mackay to be fictitious.

Believing that the real author or promoter of the work was Mr Stewart

Ross, editor of the _Agnostic Journal_ (then the _Secular Review_), one

of his most persistent and scurrilous assailants, Bradlaugh set about

bringing him to account, and soon procured adequate evidence of his

complicity. A friend had accidentally discovered for him that the book

was printed by the Edinburgh house of Colston & Co.; and on proceeding

against that firm in the Court of Session, he obtained from them an

apology, costs, and payment of £25 to his usual beneficiary, the

Masonic Boys' School. But the most effective assistance was supplied

by those concerned in issuing the book, who were soon flying at each

other's throats. In August 1888 Mr Stewart Ross prosecuted Mackay, with

a solicitor named Harvey and his clerk named Major, for conspiracy "to

obtain from him £225 with intent to defraud." Mackay had previously

brought two actions against Ross, one for slander, and one to recover

£500, which actions were settled on the basis that Mackay withdrew "all

claim against the defendant for writing the 'Life of Charles Bradlaugh,

M.P.,'" the plaintiff admitting the claim to be "based on an erroneous

conception," while Mr Ross was to pay Mackay "in respect of the other

claims" the sum of £225, besides writing Mackay a letter "denying

the slanders alleged," and opening his columns for subscriptions

to a Defence Fund on Mackay's behalf. Mr Ross now alleged, in his

prosecution for "conspiracy," that Major (whose employer was Mackay's

solicitor) had called on him and alleged that he had seen some pages

in Ross's handwriting in the MS. of the Mackay "Life," and "that he

(Ross) who had denied all share in the authorship of that work, would

be prosecuted for perjury unless he recovered possession of those

pages." Ross admittedly agreed to pay £250 (afterwards reduced to

£225) to recover the pages. In Court he would not admit that he had

written any part of the "Life," but explained that he thought some

unpublished MS. of his might have been got hold of for it. The promised

MS., he stated, was not returned, and he stopped the cheques he had

given towards the promised payment. In cross-examination he confessed

to having supplied Mackay with books and "materials" to help him in

writing the "Life," and had seen the proofs of it. Another of Ross's

coadjutors fiercely quarrelled with him, and handed over to Bradlaugh's

solicitor further evidence of his concern in the publication. Mackay,

who became bankrupt, did likewise, expressing to Bradlaugh his regret

for having been led into the publication by Ross. Bradlaugh was

advised, however, that he had evidence enough without their testimony;

and at length, after various delays, Mr Ross, through his solicitor,

begged Bradlaugh's solicitors to intercede with their client to let

him make a voluntary settlement. This being acceded to by Bradlaugh,

Mr Ross agreed in Court (15th February 1889, before the Hon. Robert

Butler, Master in Chambers) to account for and destroy within four days

all copies of the book which had "come into his possession or control,"

to pay £50 to the Masonic Boys' School, and to pay all Bradlaugh's

costs as between solicitor and client. Soon afterwards Mr Ross wrote

to the _Star:_ "I am not and never was the publisher of the 'Life,'

and I cannot 'destroy all the copies of the work' for the reason that

I never possessed more than one copy." Bradlaugh commented that he was

still willing to have the case tried in court; and that he had evidence

of Ross's sending out a large number of copies of the book for review,

and once having close on 200 bound copies on his premises. Mr Ross is

understood since to protest that he had been victimized in the matter,

and at Bradlaugh's death he penned a remorseful and eulogistic article.

Copies of the book are still believed to be on sale in underhand ways;

and Mrs Bonner has recently had to take legal proceedings against one

London bookseller who announced it in his catalogue, knowing it to be a

libel, and not legally saleable.

In connection with the same matter Bradlaugh in 1888-89 brought an

action against the _Warrington Observer_ for a libellous article

founded on the "Life;" and the proprietors, after undertaking to

justify, finally withdrew the plea, apologised, and paid the costs

and a sum of £25 to the Masonic Boys' School. A Scotch journal, the

_Dumfries Standard_, had previously apologised with promptitude,

paying costs and £10 to the Masonic Boys' School, which institution

thus netted £110 in all from the proceedings in this one matter.

Yet further, Bradlaugh sued the _Warrington Observer_ for another

libel, consisting in the publication of a malicious report of a silly

proceeding in which a man who had been subpoenaed by him in the Peters'

case applied to a London police magistrate to know whether he could

recover "costs" for a day's attendance at the court. The man had

actually been paid 10s., and Bradlaugh had refused to pay more. This

case was tried (April 1889) before Justice Manisty and a special jury,

who awarded Bradlaugh £25 damages--another windfall for the Masonic

Boys' School.

As against the manifold annoyance of libels, Bradlaugh had in 1888 one

great and solacing relief from a strain which had sorely tried him. His

various lawsuits over the Oath question, despite the success of those

against Newdegate, and the saving of outlay through his pleading his

own cases, had left him saddled with a special debt of between £2000

and £3000, on which interest was always running. And, even as the

lawsuits themselves helped to cripple his power of earning while they

were going on, his intense application to his Parliamentary work had

limited his earnings in the years following on his admission. His whole

sources of income were his lectures, his journal, and his publishing

business. But he could no longer give proper personal attention to

the pushing of the business; the lecturing was curtailed; and the

journal fell off in circulation just when it might have helped him

most. Thousands of miners had been among its subscribers, despite its

non-democratic price of twopence; but prolonged distress among the

miners caused many of these subscribers to emigrate, while many more

could no longer buy it. In villages where forty or fifty copies had

been bought, one or two had to do duty for all the remaining readers.

All the while the borrowed capital on which the Freethought Publishing

Company had opened business in Fleet Street had to bear interest,

whereas, in the ordinary course of things, it had been hoped that the

principal would have been repaid in the years that, as the event came

about, had to be devoted to a desperate struggle against political

injustice. Freethinking friends, who knew how he was worried by the

fresh debts incurred in the struggle, started a fund in 1886 to meet

the more pressing burden of £750, which then had to be repaid, and

over £500 was then collected. But in August of 1888 his embarrassments

became so serious that, answering correspondents who urged a holiday

on him, he wrote: "My great trouble now is lest I should be unable

to earn enough to meet my many heavy obligations, in which case I

should be most reluctantly obliged to relinquish my Parliamentary

career." He was then addressing seven and eight meetings a week, while

other members were recruiting on the moors and on the Continent. The

avowal, through no action of his, got into the newspapers, and was the

means of setting agoing a general public subscription, the credit for

starting which is due to Mr W. T. Stead, then the editor of the _Pall

Mall Gazette_, whose action in the matter was chivalrous and generous

in the highest degree. Another fund was opened in the columns of the

_Star_, another at Northampton, another in the _Halifax Courier_,

and the upshot was that in a month's time there had been subscribed

close upon £2500. There were over 6000 separate donations, and the

subscribers' names indicated a remarkable range of recognition. In

addition to Freethinkers and Northampton friends who had helped nobly

before and now helped again, there were remittances from sympathisers

whose goodwill had not before been known to the subject. Sir T. H.

Farrer, Lady Ripon, Mr D. F. Schloss, Lord Hobhouse (in "acknowledgment

of gallant service done for mankind"), Mr Stansfeld, Mr T. B. Potter,

Mr M'Ewan, M.P., Admiral Maxse, W. M. Rossetti, Auberon Herbert, Mrs

Ernestine Rose, Mr Labouchere, Lord Rosebery, Mr Newnes, Lord J.

Hervey, Mr Munro Ferguson, are a few of the best-known names that catch

the eye in the long lists, which include thousands of signatures. A

number of Churchmen and Conservatives subscribed as such, some of them

largely; £200 was given by one Freethinker over an initial, and £100

"from Melbourne;" groups of workers and clerks made up sums among them;

clubs collected goodly totals; widows gave their mites; and hundreds of

scattered toilers gave yet again of their scanty pence to the man they

believed in. At his wish, the funds were closed, as far as possible, on

his birthday, 26th September, when he counted fifty-six years, _bien

sonnés_. Had he allowed the subscription to continue, the amount would

probably have been doubled. As it was, he paid off all his outstanding

law debts, and had a clear £1000 to put towards the others; and he

turned with new cheerfulness and courage to his tasks, his holiday,

as usual, being of the shortest. But hard upon the great relief came

a great blow, of the kind that turns good fortune to ashes. On 2nd

December his daughter Alice died of typhoid fever, after sixteen days'

illness, aged thirty-two. She was her father's daughter in her high

spirit, in her generosity, in her energy, and in the thoroughness of

her work as a student and teacher of biology, though for all her years

of ungrudging service in the latter capacity there is only left to

show, apart from the gain and the gratitude of those she taught, her

little tract on "Mind considered as a Bodily Function." It had been

her wish that her body should be cremated; but the crematorium just

then chanced to be out of order, and she had to be buried. Briefly

acknowledging condolences, and replying to the request of many friends

to be permitted to attend the funeral, her father wrote, to appear

after it was over, the lines: "Any public funeral would have been

painful to me; and I trust I offend none in not acceding. The funeral,

private and silent, will have taken place at Woking Cemetery. The

funeral wreaths and flowers sent are reverently laid on the grave."

* * * * *

The year thus grievously closed had been for Bradlaugh as full as

the preceding ones of political work, which involved strife over and

above that of the lawsuits, and over the Oaths Bill. On two issues he

came in conflict with sections of the democracy. The first was Sir

John Lubbock's Early Closing Bill, one of those measures in which

legislatures go about to remove, as it were, tumours and swellings by

applying a vice to them. Declaring himself strongly in favour of the

shortening of hours by voluntary effort, Bradlaugh vigorously attacked

the Bill as an arbitrary and capricious application of force on wrong

principles, pointing out that it would close shops irrespectively of

the length of the shifts worked in them by the assistants, and that it

left untouched public-houses and tobacco-shops, which were kept open

latest. It had the further demerit of renewing the old Sunday Trading

Act of Charles II. and increasing the penalties. On a vote (May) it

was rejected by 278 to 95. This was one of several points at which

Bradlaugh came in conflict with the policy of empirical regulation

in which some Socialists go hand in hand with some Conservatives. He

was blamed, as before mentioned, for rejecting State interference in

some cases, while urging it in others, as that of truck. The criticism

failed to note that he opposed truck as a form of fraud, not at all

necessarily arising out of the economic situation, whereas hours of

labour are determined by the whole economic situation. While offending

some Radicals as well as Socialists by opposing time-laws, he offended

the extreme Individualists by supporting Public Libraries, which he

justified as he had justified State education, and as being a rather

more defensible form of public expenditure than much of the outlay on

armaments, to which so few individualists strongly demur, on principle

or in practice.

But his sharpest conflict with men usually on his own side was over

the Employers' Liability Bill, to which he had given constant and

laborious attention as a member of the Committee appointed to consider

the subject in 1886. He had then and afterwards taken every possible

pains to get at the views of the workers, had spoken on the subject

before many thousands of them, and had done all he could to make the

Bill as strong a measure as could be carried. He did not like it in

every respect; he objected to the retention in any form of the doctrine

of common employment, and of the principle of contracting-out, both

of which he had sought to restrict by his action as far as possible;

but the measure was in several respects an improvement on the Trade

Unions Bill of 1886, then introduced by Mr Broadhurst, Mr Burt, and

others, to amend the Liberal Act of 1880. That Bill had been referred

to a Select Committee under the Gladstone Government, which Committee

duly reported. The Bill now (1888) under discussion was, save for one

or two points, either the re-enactment of the Act of 1880, or the

formulation of the suggestions of the Select Committee of 1886. It

was, however, strongly opposed by the labour leaders, especially by Mr

Broadhurst, who denounced it as "a sham, misleading, mischievous--the

worst Bill ever introduced to the House," and moved its rejection

on the second reading (December), after it had been amended by the

Standing Committee on Law. On this, Bradlaugh had a sharp brush with

him, pointing out that with two exceptions all the complaints urged

against the 1888 Bill struck equally at Mr Broadhurst's own Bill of

1886. The hon. gentleman denounced the new Bill as protecting the

London and North Western Railway Company, whereas it did exactly, in

that regard, what his own Bill had done; and an amendment which he had

moved, as expressing his latest wishes, would equally have legalised

that Company's arrangement with its employees. Bradlaugh's criticism

was perhaps the sharper, inasmuch as he believed that the Liberal

labour leaders were mainly concerned to throw out the Bill because it

was introduced by a Conservative Government, who would in due course

have claimed the credit if it had passed. Bradlaugh knew well enough

that the Conservative party systematically facilitated certain popular

measures which the same party would have strongly resisted when

introduced by Liberals; but that was for him no reason for refusing to

pass the measures so facilitated. He took all he could get, and fought

for the return of a Liberal Government all the same. Mr Broadhurst, it

is believed, afterwards regretted in some respects the attitude he took

up, as did Sir William Harcourt, who hastily supported Mr Broadhurst

by accusing Bradlaugh of attacking the trade unions in general--a

charge which Bradlaugh instantly and warmly repudiated. However that

may be, Bradlaugh's case may be read by those who care in his letter to

his friend, Thomas Burt, M.P., published as a pamphlet. Mr Burt sent

a reply, to which Bradlaugh gave prominence in his journal, in which

one of his phrases, as to "setting the employed against the employer,"

was objected to; and on this point Bradlaugh explained the precise

limit within which he applied it. He always opposed those workers who

sought to make it illegal for masters to insure themselves against loss

through accidents to their men; and on that point Mr Burt fully agreed

with him.

A less prominent but important part of his dealings with labour

problems was his service on the Committee which investigated the

subject of the immigration of destitute aliens, and on that which

investigated the working of Friendly Societies and Industrial Assurance

Societies. As to the destitute immigrants, he was satisfied that they

were not then numerous enough to justify any legislative action.

While to some extent in conflict, as we have seen, with some of his

fellow Radicals, he was able to co-operate actively with the Irish

party. On the Bill for the Commission to investigate the charges

against the Irish members, he made what he confessed he believed to

have been one of his best parliamentary speeches, but found it either

ignored or "cut down to nothing" in the press. Recognition was forced,

on the other hand, by his ever-increasing work on behalf of India,

which in the course of the remaining two years of his life was to

make his name known to every Indian interested in the affairs of the

dependency.

1889.

Though already showing sad signs of failing health, Bradlaugh seemed

to begin the session of 1889 with even extra energy. He laid down

for himself at once a resolution dissenting from the Government's

rate of commutation for perpetual pensions; a motion to expunge from

the journals of the House the old resolutions excluding him; a fresh

resolution on the utilisation of waste lands; a repetition of his

motion for a new Rule as to the calling of members to the table; and a

motion for a Royal Commission to consider the grievances of the native

population of India; and he further introduced his Bill for the repeal

of the Blasphemy Laws, and a Bill for abolishing political pensions.

On the first paragraph of the address he made a strong speech in

opposition, criticising the foreign, Indian, and colonial policy of the

Government; and in regard to Ireland he made another of still greater

vigour, setting out and ending with a telling attack on Mr Chamberlain,

and vehemently impeaching the whole drift of Mr Balfour's policy in

Ireland. Yet, again, he spoke on the Trafalgar Square question.

The first reached of his motions was that for the expunging of the

resolutions excluding him in 1880, on which (8th March) he made an

extremely temperate speech, assuring the House, however, that on behalf

of his constituents he would certainly go on making his motion until

it should be carried. The Government strongly opposed, through Sir

Michael Hicks Beach and Sir Edward Clarke, who were however answered by

Sir Henry James and Sir William Harcourt, and Bradlaugh had 79 votes

to 122. He certainly did little about this time to propitiate the

Government, making repeated attacks on their Irish policy and their

colonial administration, besides keeping up such a fire of questions

on grievances of every description, submitted to him from all parts of

the world--miscarriages of justice, official misdeeds and tyrannies,

breaches of the Truck Act, jobs domestic and foreign, misdirection and

ruin of emigrants, fleecing of workers in Government employ, waste of

money on royal palaces, Irish oppression, and a score of things which

cannot even be catalogued. Probably no non-official member had such a

budget of daily business; and certainly none was more in earnest. At

the beginning of April we find him writing:--

"I confess that I left the House about 1 A.M. on Tuesday,

after a long sitting, in a very bad temper. All our front bench voted

in favour of the Government resolution to spend £21,500,000 on the

Navy, and to raise £10,000,000 of this by increasing the National

Debt."

Of State finance he was the most vigilant of critics; and he caused

much Tory resentment by habitually impugning the claim that the old

purchase of Suez Canal shares had been a good investment. At least ten

millions, he pointed out, had been spent in Egypt in pursuit of the

policy of looking after the shares in question.

There was thus small sign of Conservative complaisance towards his Bill

for the Abolition of the Blasphemy Laws. As always on such measures,

he spoke with extreme concision and moderation, packing his argument

with authoritative deliverances, and making only a quiet and simple

appeal to good feeling. Similar bills had been introduced by Professor

Courtney Kenny and other Nonconformists in the two preceding years,

but had come to nothing. At first the promoters had inserted what

is known as the "Indian clause," an extraordinary form of enactment

which provides that any use of language "likely" to hurt religious

feelings and cause disturbance, with the "intention" of so hurting

feelings, should remain punishable. This clause had been unanimously

rejected by Freethinkers as making fully a worse law than the old, the

vague expressions as to "intention" and "feeling" being capable of a

construction such as bigots had not ventured to put on the blasphemy

laws, and the principle being plainly destructive of that of free

discussion. Even one or two religious bodies petitioned against the

Bill on the latter score. The dissatisfaction with the clause was so

great that it was dropped, but even then it was not till Bradlaugh

took up the Bill that it reached a second reading (12th April). It

was now opposed not only by Tories, but by pious Liberals, Mr Samuel

Smith and Mr Waddy in particular taking pains to get up a panic about

the possibility of having impious caricatures distributed at the

doors of churches and Sunday schools, and children's minds blasted by

blasphemous placards. Finally there voted only 46 for and 141 against

the second reading. Most of the Liberal leaders were conspicuous by

their absence.

He was better supported in the following month in his motion to dissent

from the Government's system of commuting perpetual pensions. It was

seconded by Mr Hanbury; and after a debate, in which Mr Gladstone

spoke at some length in support of the resolution, the closure was

carried on Bradlaugh's motion by 359 votes to 96, and the resolution

was only rejected by 264 votes to 205. The moving of the closure in

the midst of a speech by Dr Clark--a step which Bradlaugh declared to

be fully justified by all the circumstances--gave some offence among

Liberals; and just before, Bradlaugh had been made the subject of a

furious newspaper attack by Mr John Burns, who pronounced him "the

greatest enemy of labour in the House of Commons," and an opponent

of "Employers' Liability Bills and other measures affecting the real

interests of the people;" described him as shirking the Trafalgar

Square question; and attacked him for having resisted a motion

to reduce the Lord Chancellor's salary. The last step would have

struck most people as one of peculiar chivalry, seeing that the Lord

Chancellor had been one of Bradlaugh's most persistent and embittered

personal enemies; but as the other items show, Mr Burns was not much

concerned as to the validity of his charges. He even chose to speak of

Bradlaugh as having sought an interview with him, when the fact was

that Mrs Besant had introduced him to Bradlaugh to get the benefit of

his legal advice. A more offensive attack was made on Bradlaugh shortly

afterwards by Mr F. C. Philips in a serial in the magazine _Time_. The

novelist made one of his characters allude to "a ruffian in the United

States--a colonel, I believe--who is a kind of Yankee Bradlaugh, only

that he has the courage of his convictions, which Bradlaugh has not."

This was by far the least offensive part of the passage; and Bradlaugh,

after expressing his surprise that any editor or publisher should

permit such a wanton attack, added:--

"F. C. Philips is right in saying, at any rate so far as he is

concerned, that I have not the courage of my opinions, for my opinion

is that I ought to horsewhip him. As I will not do that, I reprint his

words."

The publishers promptly and cordially apologised for the outrage, which

had taken place entirely without their knowledge, and which was really

a piece of gratuitous literary ruffianism, not easily to be matched in

modern times.

Much more troublous than any scurrilities or injustices from without

was the shock which now came upon him from Mrs Besant's definite avowal

of her conversion to the so-called "Theosophy" of Madame Blavatsky. No

persistence of personal regard could countervail the complete sense

of intellectual sundering from the friend and colleague of so many

years which this involved for him; and the change was the more felt

by him for that his physique was now fast giving way. But he held on

his course with unchanging fortitude, adding fresh Freethought work

to the ever-growing bulk of his work for India, and adding to his

earnings as he could by articles for the reviews which were now open

to him. An article on "Humanity's Gain from Unbelief," contributed in

the spring to the _North American Review_, elicited an invitation to

debate the point with the Rev. Mr Marsden Gibson, M.A., a Newcastle

clergyman. This was accepted, and the debate took place at Newcastle in

September, before densely packed audiences, on two successive nights.

It was conducted with good feeling on both sides, the nearest approach

to personalities being in respect of Mr Gibson's using the argument

that Bradlaugh "stood alone," since "at least eleven apostles of the

Secularist party" had left it within twenty years, Mrs Besant's being

the only name given. Bradlaugh drily replied that he doubted whether

the assertion was material to the question, but that if it were he

could remind Mr Gibson "that eleven apostles deserted _his_ founder

in the sorest hour of his need." One bystander, not a Secularist,

summed up the debate as a matter of Bradlaugh launching cannon-balls

while his opponent spun cobwebs, a criticism partly justified by the

rev. gentleman's defining "unbelief" as a state of mental indecision,

whereas Bradlaugh, of course, used the term to signify the critical

and challenging spirit. But the open-minded reader can judge for

himself on the published verbatim report. It elicited a number of

sermons, some decent and courteous, others otherwise.

If Bradlaugh could have spent his autumns on Loch Long (where at

last he had secured for the dwellers and health-seekers an almost

complete stoppage of the pollution of the waters by the discharge of

Clyde dredgings and other horrors) instead of in the usual round of

lecturing, he might still have been among us. But he could never have

the rest needed to build up his strength after the session's long drain

on it; his vascular system was fast running down, and in October 1889

he was at length prostrated by a dangerous illness, a manifestation

of the Bright's disease which was soon afterwards to destroy him. A

surprising and touching proof of the change in public feeling towards

him was given in the offering up of prayers in many churches for his

recovery--a display of goodwill not undone by shoals of religious

tracts, or even by the already started legend that he was "altering

his opinions." One clergyman, the Rev. F. E. Millson of Halifax,

generously gave a lecture specially to make a collection to help the

sick man financially, which realised £10; and Mr M'Ewan, M.P., with

characteristic munificence, sent him a cheque for £200 to enable him

to take a health voyage to Bombay, as advised by the doctors. After

weeks of extreme danger, he began slowly to regain ground. The great

frame was not to be overthrown by one attack. But the seizure had been

a terrible one: he had looked as close on death, he told us, as a

man could look and live; and it was with heavy hearts that those who

loved him saw him set sail in cold November for India. Before going,

he penned a few notes, calmly contradicting the absurd story of his

change of opinions, and other legends. "It would be ill-becoming to

boast," he wrote, "but I may say that my convictions and teachings

have not been with me subjects of doubt or uncertainty." One of the

legends, circulated by the _British Weekly_, was to the effect that "on

one occasion he said that he had almost been persuaded by a sermon of

the Rev. Arthur Mursell." On this he remarked that the story was pure

fiction; that though he had had friendly services from him, he had only

heard Mr Mursell preach once in his life; and that all he remembered

of it was the concluding intimation: "My subject next Sunday will be

'Beware of the Dog.'" The reverend editor of the _British Weekly_ had

thought fit to add to his tale the judgment: "He (Mr Bradlaugh) has

the earthliest of minds, is without a touch of poetry, imagination, or

yearning"--a Christian characterisation which the patient treated with

the charity it so eminently lacked.

There was a pathetic fitness in the advice which sent the sorely shaken

man to India to recover, if it might be, health wherewith to work. It

was just after delivering a lecture on India that he felt the first

grasp of his illness. What strength he had had, he had indeed freely

spent for India. In 1888 he had handled more Indian matters than in any

previous year; and in particular had made (27th August) an important

speech (reprinted under the title: "The Story of a Famine Insurance

Fund and what was done with it") by way of protest, in the discussion

on the Indian Budget, against the mismanagement of Indian affairs.

Early in the session he had obtained a first place for his notice of

motion on Indian grievances, but the Government took away the time; and

he now made his criticism none the less forcible. None of his preserved

speeches will better show the peculiar energy of his grasp of Indian

questions, and of his pressure on the Indian Government; few indeed

will better show one of the great characteristics of his speaking--the

intense and constant pressure of his argument, the continuance of the

highest stress of thought and feeling without a moment's lapse into

incoherence or verbiage. It was in particular a crushing indictment of

the action of Lord Lytton--the most destructive ever brought against

him, Anglo-Indians say; and the ultimate effect of it was that the

misapplied famine insurance fund was at length restored to its proper

and solemnly pledged purpose.

It was a very different pulse and note that marked the short and grave

address delivered by the stricken orator to the Indian Congress of

December 1889. On board the _Ballarat_, jotting down a voyager's "log"

for the friendly readers of his journal, he declared on the third day:

"My health is coming back very fast; my hopes are rising even more

rapidly;" but a man does not come back in a week or two to health from

the door of death; the recovery slackened; and when he reached Bombay

on the 23rd he was still far from convalescence. His reception would

have electrified him into strength again if enthusiasm could. In the

Congress Building, for the occasion of his coming, there were added

to the 2000 delegates 3000 spectators, and the whole multitude rose

to their feet in mass to cheer him as he appeared on the platform.

Hundreds of addresses for presentation had been sent to him from all

parts of India, some of them in rich cases, or accompanied by beautiful

gifts in gold and silver and ivory and sandalwood. The address prepared

by the Congress itself was read in lieu of all by the chairman, Sir

William Wedderburn, and then the guest made his speech, a grave

oration, touched with the tremour of recent suffering and restrained

by the sense of broken strength, but full of greatness and dignity--a

speech worthy of the man and of the occasion, weighty and wise in its

counsels, urging patience, and disclaiming praise. It is impossible to

read it without catching the vibration of its deep emotion, and as it

were the breath of the listening host. The sight of the living mass,

and the hearing of the actual proceedings at the Congress, gave him a

new and illuminating knowledge of the great forces he had been dealing

with; but he had nothing to unsay or unthink. Of the vitality of the

Congress movement he was well assured, and he could gather for himself

how much of sympathy among English civil servants had as yet to be

concealed.

He had no time to give to seeing the regions and the peoples which

the Congress represented; and in any case it was the voyage that was

to restore him if anything would. So on 3rd January he set sail from

Bombay for home, receiving a tremendous ovation at the Apollo Bunder,

where the carriage could scarcely get through the crowds that rained

flowers on him and Sir William Wedderburn. The end of January found him

once more at his library table and at his work, "marvellously better,"

indeed, but not restored. There was to be no restoration.

1890-1891.

Before sailing for India Bradlaugh had issued a summons to an

extraordinary and special general meeting of the members of the

National Secular Society, to be held after his return on 16th February,

to receive from him a special statement, and his resignation of the

Presidentship, and to elect a successor. This last was a step he had

hoped to postpone until he had carried a Bill repealing the blasphemy

laws. Freethought and Freethinkers would in that event stand free

and equal before the law; and, with endless tasks before him as a

legislator, he felt he might fitly withdraw from the more militant

and organising work of Secularism, of which he had done so much. But

looking to his defeat on his Bill in 1889, and to the desperate illness

he had just gone through, he felt he must needs lighten his burdens

forthwith as best he could.

The scene of his resignation was a touching one. From all parts of

England came men who had fought with and for him, some of them for a

good thirty years listening to his teaching and spreading it around,

criticising him at times, but always admiring him, standing by him

in battle and rejoicing with him in victory; and when he rose to lay

down his leadership, and the cheers of welcome on his recovery rang

warmer and warmer, it was some time before he could command himself

to speak. A few moving periods told of the necessity he lay under of

giving up a task which he was no longer fulfilling as he held it ought

to be fulfilled. The party would have rejoiced to have him hold the

office nominally, letting another do the work. But he "must be a real

President or none. My fault," he went on, "has sometimes been that I

have been too real a one (laughter), but it is no easy matter to lead

such a voluntary movement as ours. I think I am entitled to say that

the movement is stronger when I am giving up this badge of office

(holding up Richard Carlile's chairman's hammer) than when I first took

the presidential chair." And a thunderous cheer endorsed the claim.

The office had no emoluments whatever. The little wooden hammer and its

memories had been the prize for a generation of work involving much

spending. He calculated that during thirty years he had given to the

Society and its branches, as proceeds of benefit lectures, some £3000;

and the members on their part gladly relieved him of certain money

obligations of considerably less amount. He ended:--

"I do not say, 'We part friends,' because this is not parting. The

movement is still as much to me as ever, as much as it has been during

my life. For more than forty years I have been a speaker among you.

Now I lay down the wand of office, and the right to give command, but

I hope always to remain with you a trusted counsellor. And to you, I

hope unstained--to you, I hope untarnished, I give back the trust you

gave."

When the cheering and the addresses and resolutions had been got

through, he proposed as his successor in the Presidentship Mr G. W.

Foote, the able editor of the _Freethinker_ and the leading lecturer in

the movement; and on Mr Foote's being unanimously elected, he handed

over to the new President the hammer of office, with the words: "I give

it to you, George William Foote; and I trust that when it becomes your

painful duty to resign, as I do now, the progress that has been made in

the cause while you have held it will be such as to compensate for the

pain."

In dismissing the meeting he gave it some grave words of counsel:--

"The battle of Freethought in this country is not over. There are

signs, not far off, of possible strife, and there will be needed

wise heads, cool heads, and firm hearts. There is a tendency to

renew the anti-Jewish cry; and you may easily, in connection with

the lower phases of the Salvation Army, get excitement and tension

that need a greater self-command than is always shown among us, if

personal conflict is to be avoided. The forthcoming report on sweating

may bring about an attempt to raise the anti-Jewish cry; and it is

impossible to have strife between religions without the possibility of

the various religions turning on the one party that is outside all.

One element of danger in Europe is the approach of the Roman Catholic

Church towards meddling in political life.... Beware when that great

Church, whose power none can deny, the capacity of whose leading men

is marked, tries to use the democracy as its weapon. There is danger

to freedom of thought, to freedom of speech, to freedom of action. The

great struggle in this country will not be between Freethought and the

Church of England, nor between Freethought and Dissent, but--as I have

long taught, and now repeat--between Freethought and Rome."

To his political work he turned with all the strength he could

command. At Northampton his constituents welcomed him back with joyful

enthusiasm, and an address from the Liberal and Radical Association

formally expressed their felicitations. When he addressed them, he had

to stand for several minutes on end before the cheering and singing

would subside. The speech had some pregnant passages:--

"I, personally, am not so hopeful as my colleague of a democratic

Parliament in England. And why? Because a democratic Parliament in

England can only come when you pay each servant there for the work

and the service he renders you--(cheers)--and when the worry and the

wear-and-tear of earning a livelihood beside his work do not"--he

ended the sentence shortly--"sometimes break the man down."

On points of policy he went on to express himself firmly and

uncompromisingly as to the Eight Hours' movement, against which he had

already written and spoken as being utterly fallacious on the side of

practice and pernicious in point of principle; and taking the demand

for a time-law as the prelude to a demand for a wage-law, he assailed

the entire movement as illustrating the practical application of

Socialist theory to practice, both democratic and despotic:--

"As you all know well, I have always been in favour of Trade Unions;

as you know also, I have spoken for them, and I have worked with them.

(Cheers.) But I say here, I am utterly against--and though it should

cost me my seat in Parliament to-morrow, I would be against--the

doctrine and opinion that Parliament could thus add one farthing to a

man's wage, or one jot to a man's comfort. (Cheers.) What Parliament

can do is, remove restrictions; what Parliament can do is, reduce

expenditure; and what the Emperor of Germany had better do, instead

of summoning a conference of the nations of the world, is to disarm

twenty regiments (great cheering), and send back to the plough and

to the machine a huge number of men who now live upon the labour of

others, and lessen the wage of others, by being soldiers instead of

working men. (Loud cheers.) I speak most strongly on this, because

I feel most strongly on it ('Hear hear.') I am not one of those,

as you will know, who have ever yet, and I have passed too close

to the end of my life to have any thought at anyrate to become one

now--I am not one of those who have ever flattered the people, or

striven to win their favour by telling them that from the Crown or

from the Parliament that could be got which could not be got from

themselves, by themselves. (Cheers.) I would impress upon you this.

What the State gives to you, the State takes from you first; it

further charges you with the cost of collection, and with the cost of

distribution. ('Hear, hear.') Better by far for you that you should

save for yourselves and spend for yourselves, than put into the purse

of the State your earnings, of which only part can at best come back.

(Cheers)."

Just after the Northampton meeting came the death of the man who had

been his right hand in all his struggles there from the first--Thomas

Adams, now ex-Mayor. Mr Adams had been a valued friend as well as a

trusted agent, and his death came as another of the thickening blows

of fate upon the rapidly aging man. In Parliament, all the same, he

stuck sternly to his tasks. At the opening he had set down for himself

important amendments to the Indian Councils Amendment Bill and to the

Criminal Law Practice Amendment Bill; a repetition of his motions as

to waste lands and the expunging of the old resolutions excluding him;

and a motion on behalf of the financial Reform Association, calling for

the abolition of the gold and silver duties and compulsory hallmarking;

and he introduced besides an India Bill of his preparation. He at once

resumed work, too, on the Royal Commission on Vaccination, on which he

had done careful work in the previous year, charging himself as he did

to watch over the case for the anti-vaccinators, though not committing

himself definitely to their view of the facts. He had been left out of

the previous Royal Commission (moved for by himself) on Market Rights

and Tolls--partly, it was thought, because Her Majesty could hardly

be asked to include the Republican and Atheist in a list of "trusty

and well-beloved" counsellors; but in the Vaccination Commission the

difficulty was somehow overridden.

In the House, his first long speech was in opposition to the motion of

Mr Cunninghame Graham on the Address with regard to the restriction of

adult hours of labour by international legislation, and the sending

of a delegate to the "Berlin Conference" to support such proposals

there. The speech was a very vigorous one, and besides exposing some

bad blunders in Mr Graham's figures, argued strongly against the policy

of a time-law as a crude and superficial treatment of a far-reaching

economic problem. During the course of the year he developed this

criticism in various review articles and otherwise; and a systematic

treatment of it was to have made a large part of the book on "Labour

and Law" on which he was engaged at his death. Among his other

Parliamentary discussions he fought his colleague's battle on the

occasion on which Mr Labouchere was suspended for persisting in the

declaration: "I do not believe Lord Salisbury"--in connection with the

escape of Lord Arthur Somerset from a criminal prosecution.

He continued to incur a fair share of the personal abuse of which he

had had such ample experience. The _Observer_ told him that he was

an object of "loathing" to Hindoos on account of his religious and

Malthusian views; Mr Hyndman described him and Mr Burt as "friends of

the plundering classes;" Mr William Morris's _Commonweal_ dubbed him

a "renegade;" and Mr Cunninghame Graham, by way of retaliation for

punishment, declared his work to have consisted mainly in fighting

about the oath and the existence of a Deity. The _Lady's Pictorial

Journal_ more subtly described him as "no longer the rough, rugged,

carelessly-dressed man of the people, who once vainly sought admission

to the popular Chamber, but a grave, dignified, and well-groomed

senator;" and this legend of his "transformation" did duty with many

as an exculpation of their own past brutalities. It almost seems

heartless, as against such self-absolved penitents, to record the fact

that in his costume he had always been the most conservative of men,

and that he dressed in 1890 exactly as he had dressed in 1880 and 1870.

The clerical stories of "awful examples" of ruined infidels, tacked

on somehow to his name, and the more obviously knavish stories of his

having been "shown up" or "confounded" on the platform, continued

to have their customary circulation; and during his illness and his

absence the libellous "Life," of which the surplus copies had _not_

been destroyed, was more actively circulated.

Accustomed as he was to the steadfast repetition of religious fictions

against him after all manner of refutation and contradiction, he

was somewhat astonished at the length to which some of the labour

leaders had contrived to mislead their followers as to his action in

the House. At a Labour Electoral Congress at Hanley, in April, one

speaker, who declared himself otherwise friendly, actually moved a

resolution "That this Congress regrets the determined opposition of

Mr Charles Bradlaugh to the Employers' Liability Bill, as the working

men of this country desire it to be passed, and refuses to recognise

him as a labour representative." As has been above told, he had been

the strongest supporter of the Bill, whereas its rejection had been

moved by Mr Broadhurst. The mover may have been under a hallucination

in which the roles of Mr Broadhurst and Bradlaugh were reversed; but

the extent to which working men can go astray under such hallucinations

was shown by the fact that the resolution was actually carried. The

irrational hostility thus shown was of course not lessened when, in

the debate on Mr Bartley's motion for an inquiry into profit-sharing,

Bradlaugh administered another unsparing correction to Mr Cuninghame

Graham, who in his excitement became so "interruptious" as nearly to

get himself suspended. "The hon. member," said Bradlaugh among other

things, "charged Liberals and Nationalists with having done nothing to

prevent the starvation of one man whose terrible death he had brought

before the House; but what did he do himself except promote a strike

in the district, one result of which was that many men were now without

employment who had theretofore at least been kept from starving?" Mr

Graham, with his youth and health, was no match for Bradlaugh, out of

health.

While politics were thus growing increasingly contentious for him, he

paradoxically found calm in new resorts to the theological controversy.

A series of serenely trenchant papers on the question "Are the

Hebrew Scriptures Impregnable?" in criticism of the treatise of Mr

Gladstone--a criticism to which the right hon. gentleman offered no

reply--were among his writings during the session. He had increasing

satisfaction, too, in his work for India; and on the occasion of a

reception at Northampton to the delegates of the Indian Congress, he

delivered a most eloquent speech, full of his old fire, though towards

the end he was fain to express the wish that he had the force and fire

of the old years. In the House, in the course of the session, besides

constantly pressing Indian needs on the Secretary of State, he made

an important speech on the case of the Maharaja of Kashmir, whose

high-handed deposition by the Indian Government, on the scantiest

justification, had seemed to him as worthy of reprobation as wrongs

to common folk. Republican as he was, he would never admit that an

Imperial Government, which itself professed to rest on hereditary

monarchy, had the right to tread underfoot at pleasure the titles of

Indian princes; and he saw at once what the Imperialists are so slow to

see, that a brutal disregard of the established titles of such princes

is the surest way to breed disaffection to British rule, which has

the least satisfactory title of all. The official Liberal press, of

course, lectured him for his failure to see that the official course

was the right one, and charged him with championing a corrupt native

despot. The sufficient answer to such deliverances was and is that

within three years the Maharaja of Kashmir was restored, just as the

famine fund was restored on Bradlaugh's previous pressure. From such

eloquent facts we may infer what he might have done for the reform of

Indian administration had he lived, and what a loss to the cause was

his death, just as his most important plans were coming within sight of

effective discussion. In his last enfeebled years he did for India what

some men might have reckoned good work for a lifetime.

Weakened as he was, he entered on one undertaking during the summer,

which, in the state of his health, was anything but prudent. Mr John

Burns, in a public speech, spoke vaguely of challenging him to a

debate in some very large hall on the Eight Hours question; but on

being asked to come to business, declared that nothing would meet his

wishes short of an open-air debate which could be "heard" by 200,000

persons, who were to vote on the issue--a farcical proposition which

made an end of the matter so far as Mr Burns was concerned. Mr Hyndman,

however, who from endorsing Mr Burns' denunciations of Mr Bradlaugh

had in due course passed to denouncing Mr Burns, wrote to Bradlaugh

challenging him in Mr Burns' place. "I observe," he put it, "that John

Burns imposes such terms in relation to his debate with you, that

he obviously does not wish it to come off." After some contentious

preliminaries, a debate on the Eight Hours question came off between

Mr Hyndman and Bradlaugh in St James's Hall on the evening of 23rd

July. It was, like most of the debates on Socialism held in London, a

noisy scene, many of the Socialists present being disorderly in the

extreme; and it was grievous to some of us to think that Bradlaugh,

with his failing health and slackening nerves, should have the strain

of such a meeting for such a grossly inconsiderate audience as made up

the following of his opponent. The published report will serve to show

whether the advocacy on the other side made the debate worth holding.

Twice in this year did Bradlaugh seek fresh strength on his fishing

ground of Loch Long, far from the madding crowd. Failing still to

build himself up to anything like his old standard of health, he

grew more and more anxious about his money matters, the successful

management of which depended so much on his keeping up his personal

earnings. Physically unable to lecture so much as formerly, he sought

by writing review articles to keep up a sufficient income to meet all

his obligations. But on the other hand, he found himself at length

obliged to close the Freethought Publishing Company's shop in Fleet

Street, which meant too burdensome a cost for a bookselling business,

even were that business not one-half boycotted by "the trade," and

catering for only a section of the reading public. Appealing to that

section to help him in the way of clearance sales, he wrote: "There are

some folk who repeatedly say that I am rich. I should be a very happy

man if to-morrow I could assign all my assets, except my library,

which I should not like to lose, to any one who would discharge my

liabilities." The closing of the shop was made the occasion of another

painful step--the dissolution (December 1890) of the partnership which

had for so many years subsisted between him and Mrs Besant. They had

diverged too far in thought to permit of the old community of interest,

though to the last Mrs Besant continued to write for the _National

Reformer_, and there was no cessation of friendly intercourse.

Hardly was the dissolution accomplished when once more the overwrought

man was struck down by the malady which had barely let him go a year

before, and which this time was not to be fought off. On the 10th of

January 1891 he came home very ill indeed, hypertrophy of the heart

having followed on the old Bright's disease. After the first seizure

was over, he went to see his physician, who diagnosed the trouble.

Still he did not take to bed, and about midnight on the 13th an attack

of spasm of the heart, as he wrote in the last notes he penned or

dictated, "nearly finished my chequered life." It was soon to end

indeed. He rose to work as usual the next morning, and was unwilling

even to have the doctor called in again; but on the day after he was

persuaded to take to bed, though he went reluctantly, not dreaming

at first that the end was so near. He had the best of doctoring and

nursing; being attended by his old friend, Dr Ramskill, and by his near

neighbour, Dr Bell; while he had in his daughter a nurse for whom the

doctors had nothing but praise; but the case was past cure. He faced

the end, as he had done twice before, with perfect tranquillity, sorry

to close his work, but calm with the calmness of a perfectly brave and

sane man. Coming from Scotland to see him a little before the end, I

found him in the perfect possession of his judgment, occupying himself

among other things by auditing the peculiar accounts of the Salvation

Army, which he had mastered much more thoroughly than their framers

liked; and at that time, though they had no hope, the doctors thought

his illness would be a long one. He himself, I saw, was prepared for

the worst. The one regret he expressed was that he probably should not

be able to move once more the motion he had put down yet again at the

beginning of the winter session, for the expunging from the journals of

the House of the old resolutions excluding him. He had set his heart

on carrying that motion, even as a similar one had been carried after

the lapse of years in the case of Wilkes. And, happily, across the very

shades of death there came for him a light of comfort on this his last

desire. Dr W. A. Hunter, M.P., on being appealed to without the dying

man's knowledge, instantly and kindly consented to move the resolution

on his behalf on 27th January, when its turn came; and Bradlaugh, when

told of what had been arranged, declared that that was the very choice

he should have made, and turned contentedly to his rest, though he did

not suppose the motion would even now be carried.

Dr Hunter's success, however, was complete. The motion was opposed at

great length by the Solicitor-General, Sir Edward Clarke; but after

Gladstone had delivered a conciliatory speech, the front bench agreed

to accept the motion on condition that the words characterising the

resolutions to be expunged "as subversive of the rights of the whole

body of electors of the kingdom" should be dropped. These words had

been copied from the motion in the Wilkes case, so as to follow

precedent; but of course the essential thing was the consent to the

expunging of the resolutions, which very sufficiently implied all

that was said in the withdrawn words. So, after Sir Edward Clarke

had protested against a deletion, which he admitted to be "a mark of

ignominy," Mr W. H. Smith agreed to the motion; and although Mr De

Lisle made a foolish speech in opposition, even he expressed his "deep

regret at the illness of Mr Bradlaugh," while Sir Walter Barttelot not

only deplored that there should be any lack of unanimity, but expressed

his admiration of the straightforwardness Mr Bradlaugh had shown in the

discharge of his duties as a member. "God grant that the junior member

for Northampton might recover; but whatever happened, hon. members

would feel that, by accepting this motion, they had done a generous

act towards a man who had endeavoured to do his duty." So the motion

was finally carried without dissent, amid cheers, and the wrongful

resolutions were formally expunged.

Alas, when the news of the triumph was telegraphed by Dr Hunter, it was

too late to tell the dying man. Day by day he had grown weaker, albeit

cheerful and even sanguine when he drowsily talked of himself; and

now he had sunk so low that his daughter dared not rouse him with so

exciting a message. He never fully regained consciousness; and those

about him learned how bitter a thing it could be

"To hear the world applaud the hollow ghost

Which blamed the living man."

The end came on the morning of 30th January 1891. He was fifty-seven

years and four months old.

As in his previous illness, prayers had been offered up for him in many

churches; and many were the tributes of those who had been opposed

to him in religion and in politics; still more, of course, of those

more in agreement with him. But his daughter had been driven to take

the precaution of procuring signed testimony, from those who had been

attending him, that during his illness he was never heard to utter

one word "either directly or indirectly bearing upon religion or any

religious subject." The eternal pretence of a "recantation" was already

current afresh, as it had been after he resigned his presidentship of

the National Secular Society, even while he was writing his arguments

against Mr Gladstone's book, and re-stating his Atheism as explicitly

as ever in his "Doubts in Dialogue." One of the last non-political

lectures he had given, in November, had been a manifesto on "My Heresy

now and Thirty-six Years ago;" and in December he had discoursed on

"Life, Death, and Immortality" with no faltering in his doctrine.

The funeral was on 3rd February, at Brookwood Cemetery. He had never

troubled himself as to how his body should be dealt with, so his

daughter chose that it should be in the "earth to earth" fashion.

At his express wish, written in a will dated some years before, the

burial was perfectly silent--an arrangement which caused some regret

among friends, and some characteristic phrases about "being buried

like a dog" from others, who could not feel the pathos and solemnity

of the silent sepulture, amid the uncovered multitude who had come to

pay their last tribute at the grave of the man they had honoured and

loved. As he had always disliked the shows of mourning and the badges

of grief, those who knew his tastes wore none. But the grief of the

thousands who filled the trains from London to the burial-place was

such as needed no other attestation. They were of both sexes and all

classes, from costermongers to right honourables; they came from all

parts of England; and soldiers' red coats and the bronzed faces of

hundreds of Hindus gave a wide significance of aspect to the throng.

Hundreds, many of them from Northampton, had brought the little

tri-coloured rosettes they used to wear in the old fighting days; and

many threw these in the grave, some saying as they did so that their

work too was done, now that he was gone.

Over an hour after the coffin had been laid in the earth, when it was

thought that the multitude had passed away, the immediate friends and

mourners of the dead went back to take a last look, and they found that

a lingering band of devoted men had got the shovels from the workmen,

and were one by one obtaining the last sad privilege of casting their

handful of earth into the grave.

CONCLUSION.

If the foregoing volumes have not shown what manner of man Bradlaugh

was, as well as what he did, they have been written in vain. But it

may be fitting to attempt, in a closing page or two, some general

estimate of his personality. The present writer is, indeed, conscious

of unfitness for the task, were it only because of a personal affection

which must somewhat bias criticism. But when a man has had so much evil

said of him as Bradlaugh had throughout his life, the inclining of

the balance a little way towards love and admiration may be forgiven.

Indeed, most men would find it hard to write of him with perfect

impartiality. He inspired, as a rule, either aversion or admiration,

and the furious enmities of which these pages bear record were in a way

the correlative of the intense devotion given to him by thousands.

Such a description would in some cases suggest an intensely passionate

and ill-balanced nature, at once winning and grievously faulty; hardly

a man of keenly analytic intellect, remarkable self-control, and

extreme sagacity. Yet these latter qualities he certainly had. He was

in truth a singular combination of chivalrous heroism and practical

wisdom--a combination such as I cannot find a parallel for in memory.

He had the quixotic ardour of a young enthusiast, an ardour which never

left him to the end; and he combined it with a political foresight

and judgment such as few modern English statesmen have exhibited.

It was the ardour for justice and truth, the forthright sincerity

and disregard of convenient conformities, that won him the love and

allegiance of men who possessed and valued courage; and it was his

keen sagacity that kept their adherence. In modern England he stands

out singularly as a powerful and prominent man who chose to set his

face openly and systematically against what he held to be shams and

delusions, though the impeaching of them brought him the bitterest

hostility, the foulest calumny, and a perpetual struggle, where a mere

tacit conformity would have meant manifold success, wealth, and ease.

There is no country in which straightforwardness and single-mindedness

are more belauded than in England, and perhaps none in which they are

scarcer. The praise of them forms part of the "cant that does not know

it is cant," which Carlyle denounced, and exemplified. Men declare

their esteem for courage and sincerity; and when they meet a shining

example of these virtues they cast their mud with the unthinking

vulgar. No amount of reiteration of phrases about prophets who have

been stoned by the Scribes and Pharisees can withhold the average

moralist from joining the Scribes and Pharisees when the next prophet

shows face. To panegyrise old prophets in platitudes is such a very

different thing from recognising a new one in the market-place and

taking him by the hand.

Of course, while men do unquestionably dislike an innovator and fighter

for being more honest and plain-spoken than themselves, they do not

openly put their enmity on those grounds. They must find sins and

faults for him: what faults he has they will magnify and multiply. And

as, of course, all of us who practise any self-criticism at all can

realise that the hostilities we set up, however unjust we hold them to

be, have a certain basis in our shortcomings, it is only reasonable

to look for part of the pretext of Bradlaugh's enemies in his. What

then were his faults? We have seen and heard enough of those falsely

imputed: what was his real share of human infirmity? I have heard him

accused, by people who were not rabidly hostile, of egoism, vanity,

love of flattery, and a tendency to be overbearing. For perhaps all of

these charges he would himself have more readily admitted a foundation

than would his sympathetic friends. He used to make humorous allusion,

in his speeches at Freethought gatherings, to his despotism in the

chair. He ruled conferences with a rod, not of iron but of ivory--the

rod of absolute technical law. He was the most swift and unyielding

of chairmen; and men unwittingly out of order called him not only

hard but unjust. But some who had resented his way in these matters

have been known spontaneously to wish for his ruling hand when it was

still. In all matters where authority and command belonged to the

situation, and he was in authority, he ruled with a military firmness

and quickness; and as no man can miss making mistakes, he must have

made some, though they would be hard to prove. Nay, he himself avowed

a certain stress of nervous energy which, on bustling occasions,

made him abrupt and impatient of meddling and dilatoriness. This

overplus of energy came out quaintly in his inveterate habit of being

much too early for a train. He had, in fact, the relative defect of

the Napoleonic quality of swift decision and intense determination.

Thus, as one Freethinker once told him, his manner was not always

"economical;" and the hostilities he aroused were apt to be as intense

as the admirations, and to be hindrances to his career. Most of his

enemies were themselves certainly faulty men, and not a few were very

bad men indeed; but he would not have denied that he might at times

have made an honest man his unfriend. Such an abnormal will-power as

his[193] cannot miss making some of the manifestations of excess of

driving power in the human machine. But nothing could be more mistaken,

or more unjust, than to make out that this stress of will-power made

him an unjust or an inconsiderate man. On the contrary, tried by the

decisive tests of his family life and his relation to his colleagues,

he was the fairest and most tolerant of men. Of his family virtues

his daughter has told: of his considerateness as an editor all who

worked with him can speak. I never knew or heard of one who even came

near him in his regard for the independence of his contributors, and

in his concern to give the fullest hearing to opponents. In all the

essentials of just-mindedness he was singularly well endowed; it was

only in respect of physiological over-emphasis that he could ever be

impeached. And even on that score, as has been above abundantly shown,

it is utterly false that he was ever brutal in speech, or arrogant or

discourteous in intercourse or controversy. He was even criticised

at times for a certain old-world courtliness, more continental than

English, and this long before he had won general recognition. A

thousand printed reports and testimonies go to dispose of vague and

unsupported aspersions. I am told that in the last year or two of his

life, when his nervous and vascular system was breaking up, he was

at times sharply impatient of incompetent opposition on the secular

platform, but that is a small matter against the self-control of a

lifetime. Tried by, or in comparison with, his peers, he needs no

vindication.

[Footnote 193: His head gave a remarkable corroboration to the

classification of the old phrenology, now being revindicated by the

posthumous work of Mr Mattieu Williams. It had a highly intellectual

cast at the brow, but the whole head sloped up to the organ of will,

which dominated everything in his skull outline as in his character.]

On the points of "egoism" and "vanity" I have heard him forestall

criticism. He confessed that he sought power, and shaped his life to

attain his ambitions--these being what they were. He had simply the

egoism of an extremely powerful man with an end in view. But it was

never the egoism of a Napoleon, stooping to meanness as readily as it

hazarded battles. He was an honourable gentleman to the end. Those

who deprecated his legal way of fighting legal battles simply failed

to appreciate the lawyer's method. That he was a born as well as a

trained lawyer many lawyers have admitted; and he fought technically,

and thwarted his enemies by technicalities, because law was to him

a technique. Nobody but a man with a genuine belief in it as a

technical system would have gone to law as often as he did, even to

resist gross injustice. On the point of "vanity," again, he frankly

anticipated criticism. "Oh, don't say that: _I_ am very vain," I once

heard him say to Madame Venturi when she was protesting that a certain

statesman's vanity was insufferable. Of course such a confession could

not come from a really vain man. He once spoke of "the Irish part of

my character" as something that his friends must allow for. A man who

can thus detect foibles in himself is not badly swayed by them. As

for the charge that he was susceptible to flattery--a variant on the

trite and stupid charge of "love of notoriety"--it came latterly, I

think, only from Liberals in the House who grudged his popularity among

the Tories, they themselves seeing in him a stumblingblock to that

species of success which both parties are so apt to set above pursuit

of principle. The later Tories, having nothing to suffer in the esteem

of the pious from friendship with him, showed him some consideration;

while the official Liberals uneasily anticipated the demand from

their supporters outside that Bradlaugh should be in the next Liberal

Cabinet. It is painful to have to say that to such Liberals his death

was a relief. And it is intelligible that they should prefer to see in

his geniality and courtesy a fishing for Tory flattery rather than a

manly merit. If after years of desperate strife, conscious of failing

health, the aging fighter had been sedulous to win goodwill, it would

have been small harm; but he was genial out of the very warmth of

heart that had made him a fighter. Of his unwavering fidelity to the

Radical principles of his life it would be vain to say anything here

if the preceding pages have not made it clear. The respect which he

won from political opponents in the House was no result of compromise

on his part, or of his resistance to certain Socialist doctrines. He

was in sharp collision with them on other issues to the last. A good

testimony to the genuineness of their respect is that which comes from

the late Mr W. H. Smith, in his biography by Sir Herbert Maxwell. It is

there told that once in 1886 Mr Smith's private secretary, travelling

in the same railway carriage with Bradlaugh, happened to mention the

station at which he was going to stop. "Ah, you are going to stay

with Mr Smith," said Bradlaugh. "Well, I don't suppose there is a

man in the House of Commons or in England with whom I am more widely

at variance on many subjects, yet there is none for whom I have more

sincere respect." In the evening the secretary told his host that he

had travelled down with Bradlaugh. "Indeed," said Smith. "Well, it's

a strange thing; I don't believe there is a man whose opinions I hold

in greater abhorrence than Bradlaugh's; but I cannot help feeling

that there is not an honester man in Parliament." And I have myself

heard Bradlaugh speak in private of the genuineness and simplicity of

Smith's character--in respect of such a matter as private donations

to churches--even at a time when he had penned humorous paragraphs on

Smith's head-butler manner of leading the legislature. Both men were

honest, and that was a ground of sympathy. And though the professor of

the "religion of love" had to express "abhorrence" of the opinions he

rejected, he called to make friendly inquiry when Bradlaugh lay on his

deathbed--an attention paid by none of the Liberal leaders.

But this honesty, which won him the regard of antagonists when they

came close enough to see it, was simply the manifestation in political

life of the fundamental and propulsive love of truth and reason which

made him an Atheist propagandist. He happened to care for truth and

justice all round, where other men were satisfied with a measure of

homage to one or two principles they cared to recognise, or prejudices

they cared to gratify. He had leapt forward, from his youth up, at the

sound of the trumpet in every good cause, where they had mostly been

careful to count the cost.

"No fetter but galled his wrist;

No wrong that was not his own."

And to his last days, he never learned the sordid lessons of prudent

conformity even where they might have meant a serious lightening of

his burdens. Once in the last year of his life, I commented jestingly,

as laying down the code of commercial journalism, or his devotion of

columns of his journal to dry details of the Indian grievances he

took up, when he might have raised the circulation by lampooning his

fellow-members. He felt so strongly on the subject of English disregard

of Indian claims that even the jest disturbed him, and he met it with

an _Et tu, Brute_. No man was saner in the adjustment of a necessary

compromise in legislation; but no man was ever more innocent of the

spirit of Nothingarianism. "Good God, Bradlaugh," said a friendly

Conservative member to him one day, reproaching him for his quixotry,

"what does it matter whether there is a God or not?" The amiable

indifferentists who subscribe to that philosophy, though they may

have been able to appreciate him as a companion, will never be able

to understand the enthusiasm which Bradlaugh aroused in thousands of

those who followed him, and even in some whose way of thought diverged

far from his. I have heard of one eminent professional man who long

wore Bradlaugh's portrait next his breast, and long hesitated between

following him and turning Catholic. Men who never had any leanings that

way could the more heartily give their devotion. Certain it is that

Bradlaugh evoked a passion of love and loyalty from thousands, such as

no other public man of his day called forth. His followers followed him

as Nelson's men did Nelson. Mr Gladstone has the enthusiastic reverence

of myriads; but men who would go through fire and water for their

leader, and give up their tobacco to send him a weekly sixpence, were

to be looked for rather in Bradlaugh's following than his.

Men turned instinctively to Bradlaugh as to a born leader. Had any

great social convulsion arisen in his time, such as some foretell for

the near future, he would infallibly have come to the front as none

of his political contemporaries were fitted to do--as Cromwell did

and as Danton did. In him the faculty of action was not limited to the

sphere of the forum and the bureau. It has been told[194] how, when in

Spain, he offered to the Republican leaders to go with fifty horsemen

and shoot the traitorous general in the north; and we may safely hold

with the narrator of this episode that "he would have done it" had

the offer been accepted. Among the many adventures of his younger

days, the details of which will probably never now be put together,

was a singular attempt in which he took part to secure the election

of a Liberal Pope. He carried letters to and fro in Europe on behalf

of Italian and other democrats who had conceived the scheme. All I

learned from him was the fact of his positively taking part in the

enterprise, which, of course, failed. In these and other journeys he

ran many risks; and he told a funny story of how, travelling one night

in a German train with a good deal of money in his possession, and

being awakened from his sleep, with the train at full speed, by the

conductor's lamp presented to his face, after the continental fashion,

where on his lying down there had been no one else in the compartment,

he in an instant had that startling and startled functionary by the

throat in the opposite corner of the carriage. His army training and

his later experiences had developed in him a remarkable turn for

dealing promptly with physical emergencies; and persons who sought,

in the old days, to block the "Reform" processions for the leading

of which he was responsible, came to swift and serious confusion.

To the last he had in him something of Cromwell's Berserker temper,

though at his blood's hottest he could never have been guilty of the

Puritan's ferocity. It came out in him in such acts as his personal

seizure and expulsion of rowdies from his meetings. I saw him effect

this dramatically enough at one of the great St James's Hall meetings

he organised about 1886. Tories had come with forged tickets, but

were detected and ejected; and these, or others, determined to give

due trouble, took the course of keeping up a loud and distracting

tapping on the glass door at the off end of one of the balconies. The

disturbers being in great force outside, the doorkeepers were helpless;

the loud click-click was disconcerting the speaker then on his feet;

and the audience were growing more and more irritated and restless.

Bradlaugh left the chair, passed down and then up to the balcony,

made his way along to the door, opened it sharply and disappeared,

but in a moment re-entered, holding a man by the collar. This was the

ringleader with the stick. Startled at the apparition of Bradlaugh, he

had involuntarily raised that weapon; but in a flash it was out of his

hands and broken across Bradlaugh's knee. The pale disturber was then

taken by his captor--still by the collar--along the crowded balcony to

the platform end, where he was ejected by the other doorway. He did not

return: his followers broke up; and the meeting proceeded in peace,

after a spontaneous expression of its satisfaction at the manner of the

relief. That there was nobody like Bradlaugh for an awkward emergency,

was the fresh verdict of his followers.

[Footnote 194: _National Reformer_, February 8, 1891.]

And these things, and his shaping of his life, were all of a piece with

the extraordinary effectiveness of his oratory. In tempestuous power

and intensity of feeling it surpassed any that it has ever been my lot

to listen to: it roused men to great thrills of sympathy apart from

any of that foregone approbation which swells the cheering for so many

political leaders. He could make enthusiastic followers at one hearing,

and keep them for a generation. Oratory was with him not an art, but

an inspiration; he even misused his wonderfully powerful voice; but

he sounded easily all the notes of eloquence, giving at times the

whole gamut of effect, jest, pathos, gravity, reasoning, epigram, and

thunderous vehemence, in a quarter of an hour's speech. The platform

was pre-eminently his place; and no one who merely reads his articles

written for reading, tersely strong as his style generally is, can

know the extent of his power over language. It did not lie in any

special sonority of vocabulary or choice of cadence, but in a volcanic

sincerity and spontaneous fire of speech which yet never passed beyond

the control of logic and judgment--something equally removed from

the measured passion and forceful dignity of Bright, and the copious

mellifluence of Gladstone. It was the oratory of unswerving conviction,

grave or impassioned or satirical in turn, but always felt and never

factitious. He spoke as he lived and fought, going straight for his

mark, and staking all on the issue.

To those whom his career leaves cold and whom his character cannot

attract, it is enough to say that those who applaud the career and

honour the character recognise in them, in their special kind, that

invincible and unforgettable something which marks men for remembrance

long after their immediate influence has passed away--the something

which in artists and poets and warriors we call genius. What Mr John

Morley has called the dæmonic elements of character, but may perhaps

better be called the dynamic elements, were present in Bradlaugh in

a degree which gives a personality a lasting interest. Beside the

cautious and merely judicious or clever men, he stands out as one of

larger mould and greater fibre, a battling and conquering Titan, sure

of the sympathetic retrospect of happier days. It is not merely that

as a statesman he impressed friends and foes alike with his insight

and his sagacity; and that he combined the fire of the orator with

the exactitude of the scholar and the rigorous thinking of the born

reasoner; but that in him sagacity never ceased to be heroic, and that

his commanding powers rested on a character more commanding still.

When, in September 1892, twenty months after his death, a gathering

was held in his memory on the occasion of the completion of the bust

for his grave, the enthusiasm was as strong, the throng as dense, the

tributes as warm, the sympathy as keen, as on the day he was struck

down. His name is verily not written in water. And the bronze bust

on his tomb, recalling as it does the high front and the unflinching

eye which his friends loved to associate with him, and seeming as it

does to face fate with an immovable strength and firmness, will for

many a year say to passers-by what has been sought to be told in these

pages--"This was a man."

THE END.

* * * * *

APPENDICES.

APPENDIX I.

MR. BRADLAUGH'S BIRTHPLACE.