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

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.