Charles Bradlaugh: a Record of His Life and Work, Volume 2 (of 2)

CHAPTER IV.

CLOSING YEARS

1886

Admitted at last to the seat for which he had fought so long and so hard, Bradlaugh set himself strenuously to work to make up for lost time. With nearly every quality that goes to make a good legislator, and with the most abundant political experience from his youth up, he had reached his fifty-third year before he sat in his place in Parliament by secure tenure. He had fought for that place, in all, eighteen years – chronically during twelve of them, against constitutional opposition; continuously through six of them, against gross injustice. And in these last six years, unhappily, his life went very much quicker than the years. Those who had lived by him through it all recognised that it had made him an old man. A certain aging effect seems to have come from the terrible attack of typhoid fever in New York in 1875; but still in 1880 his portraits show him in his prime, the face mature without being furrowed. In 1886 he looked far more than ten years older. The long battle had left its dire marks.

No private member in his prime, however, went to work in the Parliaments of 1886 with such energy. Before January was out he had obtained leave to bring in his Land Cultivation Bill,190 which was backed by Mr Joseph Arch, Mr Thomas Burt, and Mr Labouchere; and he was extorting from the officials exact details as to the Perpetual Pensions, against which he had already for years agitated outside. In March he obtained from the new Liberal Ministry the appointment of a Select Committee on the subject. The debate on Mr Jesse Collings' amendment to the Address, calling for labourers' allotments – the amendment on which the Tory Ministry were thrown out – gave him his first opportunity of striking a blow at the party which for him was identified as much with tyranny in general as with tyranny towards himself. In February he gave the first notice of his intention to raise a question which he later pushed far – that of market rights and tolls; his first move being to call for a return giving minute particulars as to the state of the case in each municipal borough in England and Wales. And in the same month he was vigorously pressing his proposal for a Labour Bureau on the lines of that of Massachusetts – a proposal to which the Government promptly acceded. In March he took a step abundantly justifiable on public grounds, in moving the reduction of the monstrous vote of £12,000 to Sir H. D. Wolff for six months' unprofitable service abroad, and £3000 more for telegrams in connection with his mission. And he was further able to connect another enemy, Sir Henry Tyler, with systematic breaches of the Truck Act on the part of the Rhymney Iron Company, of which he was a director. Bradlaugh characterised the action of the Company as part of "an infamous system by which poor men are defrauded of part of their earnings." The result was a Government prosecution and the infliction of the fullest statutory penalty. In the way of direct service to labour, he was in the same month appointed a member of the Select Committee on the Employers' Liability Bill, on which he worked hard and carefully. In April came the epoch-marking Home Rule Bill, in the debate on which he made a powerful speech in support, loudly cheered by the Home Rulers who had so long helped to exclude him. He was emphatic against the exclusion of the Irish members, but urged that such points should be left for discussion in committee; and he did his best outside for the second reading by organising a great mass meeting in St James's Hall, presided over by Mr Labouchere, which was in its way a great success, a multitude coming sufficient to fill the hall twice over. His own Land Cultivation Bill came to its second reading; and his speech upon it was well received, though he saw fit not to try to press it to a division. Again in June, shortly before the decisive division, he delivered a second and longer speech in support of the Home Rule Bill, to listen to which to the end Mr Gladstone delayed his dinner; and on the dissolution he issued an "Appeal to the Electors: Mr Gladstone or Lord Salisbury: Which?" He had done more than justice by the people whose representatives had most zealously done him injustice. Readers of his journal had written to urge this on him as one reason for opposing Home Rule. He answered: "If I cannot try to do justice to my political and religious enemies, I am unfit to be a legislator." On the merits of the reform he tersely observed: "Home Rule is no four-leaved shamrock, but it is the beginning of justice."

In the new General Election, a new excitement was given to the contest in Northampton by the candidature of a Liberal Unionist, Mr Turner, a leading local manufacturer, in coalition with a Conservative. His supporters were extremely confident; but when the vote was counted the figures stood: Labouchere, 4570; Bradlaugh, 4353; Turner, 3850; Lees, 3456. On the declaration of the poll, Mr Turner, being shouted down by the crowd, addressed to the reporters the intimation that he "came forward for the first time to wrest the representation of the town from the greatest and most mischievous demagogue of the present century." But by this time the old obloquy had considerably quieted down. At the beginning of the year the Bishop of Peterborough, Dr Magee, had published a review article in which, while making hostile allusion to Bradlaugh – doubtless in recollection of old criticisms – as an Atheist "whose name certainly neither softens nor sweetens any controversy with which it is connected," he declared forcibly against the Parliamentary Oath altogether. As he truly observed,

"Whatever else our present Parliamentary Oath was designed to effect, it was never designed to keep Atheists out of Parliament. It was, and is, strictly a political test, and for a purpose happily quite remote from modern English politics. It is dynastic… It does not even … exclude Republicans; for, should the Parliament which imposes it decide at any time upon the ultimate abolition of monarchy, there would then be no 'successors according to law' to whom to be faithful… As a political test, it is practically all but obsolete… It does not even incidentally and indirectly act as a religious test, for no Atheist that we know of has ever refused to take it."

Oddly enough, while arguing for the abolition of the Parliamentary Oath, the Bishop proposed to "retain" the oath in courts of justice, being apparently unaware that there it was already to some extent optional. His opinion on the other point, however, counted for something; and though an appeal was made to the Liberal ministry, as it had been made to their predecessors, to prosecute Bradlaugh afresh for sitting and voting, the ministry refused, and the matter dropped once for all. There was also, of course, a cessation of the attacks on him by Conservative members. One, a Mr E. H. Llewellyn, at a Primrose League meeting early in the year, scurrilously spoke of him as having "seemed more as if he spat upon than kissed" the Testament in taking the oath; but for this congenial indulgence Mr Llewellyn had to make a public apology to Bradlaugh and to the House of Commons alike. Bradlaugh was an excessively inconvenient enemy to have at close quarters.

No one knew this better than Lord Randolph Churchill, who was now promoted to the leadership of the House of Commons over the head of Sir Michael Hicks Beach. "The most bitter enemy of the Tory party," wrote Bradlaugh, "could hardly have planned for it greater degradation than this leadership." One Tory journalist attributed to him, quite falsely, a proposal to hiss Churchill on his first rising to address the House. That was not his way of fighting. The "new leader," on his part, was extraordinarily conciliatory. When the new Parliament met in August, Churchill made not even a sign of wish to stand again between Bradlaugh and the oath; and when Bradlaugh made his important motion that the House do not assent to the usual Sessional Order prohibiting the interference of peers in elections, his lordship actually offered him a committee for the following year to frame another Order instead, admitting that the existing one was habitually ignored. Bradlaugh, however, pressed the matter to a division, when 126 members supported him, the Liberal leaders voting with the Tory majority against him. His object had been, as the vigilant Newdegate noted, to take the "first step to getting rid of the House of Lords." By allowing peers to interfere freely in elections, he proposed to strike at their hereditary privilege. But the time for such a measure was not yet.

It was understood to be on Churchill's urging, again, that two months afterwards the Tory Attorney-General entered a stet processus in the still outstanding appeal to the House of Lords, thus ending an action which the Gladstone Ministry had declined to end at Bradlaugh's request. But Bradlaugh in no way slackened his hostility on this score. On 19th September, in a discussion on the committal of Father Fahy for using threatening language towards magistrates, he reminded the House how its leader had once declared in the House that the Crown could procure the decisions it wanted from certain judges. Churchill, entering the House later, and learning what had been stated, assured Bradlaugh that he had been entirely mistaken, and gave the statement an unqualified denial. On Bradlaugh saying he thought he was right, Churchill made the curious answer: "I am sure he cannot find anywhere a record of my having said such a thing." Bradlaugh immediately went to consult Hansard, and not finding the passage he had expected, came back and frankly confessed the fact to the House. But on turning back he found that he had made an equivalent statement in his letter to Northcote on 1st March 1884, and that Northcote, while disputing in his reply certain of Bradlaugh's assertions, lest he should be taken to admit them, did not dispute this. A more leisurely search in the newspaper files cleared up part of the mystery. Churchill had repeatedly said in effect what Bradlaugh had attributed to him. In at least three speeches (30th April 1883; 21st February 1884; 12th June 1884) he had directly and indirectly insinuated that the Government could get the decisions they wanted in a collusive action against Bradlaugh by bringing it before judges who had been Liberal Attorneys-General. What had apparently happened was that the noble lord had struck at least one passage out of the Hansard report when, according to custom, the proofs of his speeches were sent to him as to other members for correction afterwards. Having done this, he felt safe in saying that Bradlaugh "could not find anywhere a record" of such a statement on his part. It was a mistaken confidence; and besides publishing the newspaper extracts at the time, Bradlaugh later found an opportunity to pay off his score with interest.

In the October of 1886, meantime, he addressed to the noble lord an open letter of scathing comment on his policy, his tactics, his speeches, and his character. It contained the sentence – referring to "old English gentlemen" – "These belong to a class to which I, as well as yourself, am a stranger – I from birth, and you from habit;" and in reference to his lordship's language (outside) towards Mr Gladstone, it had the passage: "He has often been generous to you – the great can be generous. You might, in taking a leader's place, at least have for the moment aped a leader's dignity. Noblesse oblige; but no such obligation weighs on you; où il n'y a rien le roi perd ses droits." Yet even after this Churchill sought to make his personal acquaintance and disarm his resentment making repeated attempts to be introduced, and on one occasion actually intervening with a broad compliment in a conversation between Bradlaugh and another member in the smoking-room. Bradlaugh bowed with the old-fashioned ceremony which he adhered to in such cases, but would not further accept the obtruded friendship. He had, however, passed beyond his former disposition to square accounts with the lordling who had called his supporters the "mob, scum, and dregs." I once heard him remark that it was pitiful to see Churchill, with his fidgety, lawyer's-clerk manner and tactics, trying to rise to the dignity of the leadership of the House, trying not to twist his moustache all the time, and to listen to opponents like a statesman. And some story he heard of an act of generosity on Churchill's part helped further to disarm his never very vindictive hostility.

Nothing, indeed, could well surpass the magnanimity with which he put away from him all rancour for the endless insults he had received. New Tory members, expecting perhaps to see in him a truculent demagogue, were disarmed on finding a genial gentleman and comrade, who bore no malice, was excellent company, and played chess as sociably as skilfully. As the years went on, there actually arose a sort of enthusiasm for him among the younger Tories, more than one of whom assured him that they deplored the treatment he had met with at the hands of their party. Of course they did not suffer from the embarrassment of the Liberals at the prospect that the irrepressible Atheist, with his extraordinary gift for legislation, would possibly have to be included in the next Liberal administration.

This feeling began to arise very rapidly among the Radicals outside. His prompt success in securing the Labour Bureau, and in checking the practice of truck in Scotland and England, brought him immediate votes of thanks from labour organizations, though the press at this stage practised against him such a boycott that at a time when he was constantly speaking on the estimates, correspondents wrote deploring his silence in the House. The old tactic of ostracism was not easily unlearned; and the official Liberal journals, as the Daily News, for years on end sought to suppress the fact that it was he who had brought about the Labour Bureau. So anxious were such journals to keep him out of sight, that when the important return moved for by him as to market rights and tolls was issued, and had to be discussed, the News dealt with it elaborately without mentioning that it was Bradlaugh who had obtained it.

No conspiracy, however, could suppress general knowledge of such a mass of work as he got through, outside the House as well as inside. When it was not sitting, he was on lecturing tours, and I find that in the last three months of 1886, Parliament being in recess, he addressed nearly sixty political meetings in all parts of the country, in addition to his Secularist lecturing, which he never abandoned, though he devoted a larger proportion of his lectures to politics than formerly. In the House, besides working specially at his questions of truck and land cultivation and perpetual pensions, and serving on the committee to consider the effects of the Employers' Liability Act, he was one of the most generally industrious of legislators. All this strain was not for nothing, and at the end of the year we find him suffering from erysipelas and neuritis.

1887.

In the session of 1887, however, he went to work with unslackened energy. In a long speech delivered to a full house in the debate on the address, he attacked the Government on their permission of illegal truck practices, on their Egyptian policy, on their Burmese policy, and on their Irish policy. On the resignation of Lord Randolph Churchill, the new Commons leader, Mr W. H. Smith, continued the Tory policy of concession to the former victim of the party; and he was granted a Select Committee on Perpetual Pensions, himself being a member. The point raised by him last year as to peers' interference in elections was made the subject of investigation for another committee (of seven), moved for by the Government, and on this too he sat. The majority of the committee, of course, soon reported in favour of leaving the Sessional Order unaltered, Bradlaugh and Mr Whitbread dissenting. Meanwhile, he was continuing his attacks on the practice of truck, and got down for discussion a Truck Act Amendment Bill in addition to the Affirmation Bill which he had introduced when Sir John (formerly Mr Sergeant) Simon's came to nothing. In March, too, he took an active part with Mr Howell and Mr Labouchere in the attack on certain members of the Corporation of London, including, and specially, his own old enemy, Alderman Sir R. N. Fowler, for corrupt expenditure. In Fowler's presence Bradlaugh on his part "undertook to specifically connect the hon. baronet with the issue of City funds under conditions which compelled the knowledge on his part that they were corruptly used for the purpose of influencing the decisions of that House. He would prove that up to the hilt." And again he renewed his energetic action against the huge expenditure on Sir H. D. Wolff's mission to Cairo, a mission which, he declared, amid Radical cheers, to be a gross Conservative "job;" and he had the support of 146 members to his motion to quash the vote.

The charges against the Corporation were formally heard before a Select Committee of the House of Commons, Bradlaugh acting as prosecutor. Fowler, without really denying the charges in the House, had described them as "anonymous tittle-tattle;" and on the insufficiency of this disclaimer being pointed out, one of the ministers, Lord G. Hamilton, formally denied the charges on Fowler's behalf. Before the Committee – consisting of Lord Hartington, Sir Joseph Bailey, Mr Dillwyn, Mr Houldsworth, and Mr Stevenson – the statements made as to expenditure were proved,191 as Bradlaugh had promised, "up to the hilt." Fourteen witnesses were examined by him; the City accounts for five years and other documents were closely gone into; and when the alleged payments could no longer be disputed, the defence (conducted by Mr J. Compton Lawrence, Q.C.) took the line of arguing that the challenged payments were within the right of the Corporation. They had been made during a number of years by way of resisting the popular movement for the reform of the municipal government of London. In the words of Bradlaugh: —

"£19,550, 10s. 10d. was proved to have been expended in financing Associations such as the Metropolitan Ratepayers' Association, Metropolitan Local Self-Government Association, Anti-One-Municipality League, and South London Municipal Association, described by Mr Howell as 'bogus' Associations, which were mostly started by paid agents employed by City officials, under the direction of, and with the knowledge of, the Special Committee; and which Associations were used as a means of creating a fraudulent, unfair, and collusive opposition to the proposed legislation for London municipal reform. Improper use and malversation of funds were also shown in promoting and carrying on collusive and fictitious charter movements in Lambeth, Woolwich, Greenwich, and other places in the metropolis, with the view of representing these to Parliament and to the Privy Council as spontaneous and bona-fide movements, when they were really only intended as opposition to the Government Bill. (The fictitious nature of the charter movement is especially illustrated by Mr Stoneham's answer: 'When the London Government Bill was dropped, the charter movements were let fall through by the City to a great extent.') Improper use was further shown in paying men to attend in very large numbers for the purpose of opposing, sometimes with violence, the meetings in favour of the reform of the Corporation; in paying for sham deputations, sham meetings in favour of the City, and for unfair reports which were published in the press; in procuring signatures to petitions," etc.

The most extraordinary thing of all was the fact that in the case of one municipal reform meeting in 1883, at least 2000 forged tickets had been issued, and their distribution was not obscurely traced to Corporation officials. In regard to this matter, Fowler was shown to have helped to evade inquiry when it was challenged at the time; and in regard to the improper expenditure, he was shown to have been officially cognisant; and though the Committee let off their fellow-member as lightly as they could, he had a very bad quarter of an hour under Bradlaugh's examination. One by one, the champions of the religiosity of the legislature against the Atheist had been shown to do their cause small credit in their persons. About the same time Bradlaugh took a leading part in exposing in the House a gross and systematic fraud in the preparation of a certain petition from Haggerston, signatures having been forged and invented wholesale, to the extent even of putting names of infant children and racehorses; and this again was done for payment made by City officials. But on Bradlaugh's side there was no subordination of the public to his private interest; and when, in April 1887, Newdegate died in the odour of sanctity, he displayed no vindictiveness in his comments on the local obituary biography, which of course dealt freely with his own name. "I am credibly informed," he wrote, "that, apart from his bigotry against Catholics and heretics, Mr Newdegate was a kindly country gentleman, well liked by those who knew him. I regret to learn from his biographer that he treated the six years' harassing anxiety and cost to myself, which he did so much to continue, as a subject for merriment."

In respect of his legislative work he was as successful as he was industrious. By the end of April he had got his Truck Bill into the Committee stage; and he secured from the Government, without a blow, the Royal Commission on Market Rights and Tolls for which he moved in a speech of an hour's length.192 The manner of this success was singular. In the words of one Tory journal: "It was no secret that the Government intended at first to oppose Mr Bradlaugh's motion, but it gave way on receiving an intimation from a large number of Conservative members sitting below the gangway that, if a division took place, they would be compelled to vote with the junior member for Northampton." So oddly had the tables been turned. Yet he had in no way slackened his opposition to Tory policy. On the Coercion Bill he had made three forcible speeches, and he was always pursuing ministers with awkward questions. His success with the enemy was due simply to the irresistible impression he created of honesty and industry and single-mindedness. And when in May he made a merciless exposure of Churchill on the point above alluded to, of his old imputations on the integrity of Liberal judges, it did not appear that Conservatives failed to enjoy the proceedings. It was in the course of the privilege debate on the Times' articles on "Parnellism and Crime." Bradlaugh first elicited from Churchill a repudiation of one of his former utterances, and then proceeded to quote in full the passage from Hansard, with the now verified reference. Another challenge elicited another denial, and yet another quotation, with the reference. They were all ready for this occasion. "I am not responsible for Hansard," cried the noble lord, in much agitation; whereupon Bradlaugh added new and sharper punishment, going on to quote yet more of the damnatory passages from Hansard. "The noble lord," he went on, "was of opinion in 1884 that the courts of law were not fair tribunals," whereupon Churchill again indicated dissent. "It was perhaps," admitted Bradlaugh, "not quite correct to say that the noble lord was of that opinion – he only said it." And still the castigation went on, the House punctuating it with laughter, till Churchill rose and protested that in regard to his recent speeches on the Times question he had been utterly misrepresented. Whereupon "Mr Bradlaugh said he was not dealing with the noble lord's views – he did not know what they were. (Opposition cheers and laughter.) He was only giving the noble lord's words." At the close of the speech, which as a whole was unanswerable, Churchill rose to offer a "personal explanation" on the Hansard business. Delivered with anxious prolixity, it was primarily to the effect that in 1884 his speeches were "greatly compressed" in Hansard, "as is invariably the case with ordinary members," and that the compressed reports could not be taken as true and faithful. This gave Bradlaugh his final opportunity.

"I accept the explanation of the noble lord [on the bearing of his words on the Times case], and I can corroborate his statements as to the compression of his speeches, because I used at one time to hear from him expressions which, having unguardedly repeated them without verification, I could not find in Hansard when I went to look for them. (Loud laughter and cheers.) The only mental difficulty I have is to imagine how any process of compression could put words on record which were never spoken. (Loud laughter and cheers.)"