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

On the whole, however, the tone of the discussion improves from year to year. In the "Knowlton" trial, the then Solicitor-General, Sir Hardinge Giffard (now Lord Halsbury), after hearing abundant evidence to show that the details made known in the pamphlet were just such as were made known in a number of other current works never prosecuted, though freely circulated by prominent booksellers; and after himself expressly avowing that "the book, I think it may be said, is carefully guarded from any vulgarity of expression" – nevertheless persisted in coarsely describing it as "dirty and filthy." Yet he himself was so gratuitously indecent in his own language that in a number of passages it had to be paraphrased or expunged in the report. And though the puzzle-headed jury "entirely exonerated the defendants from any corrupt motives in publishing," they were "unanimously of opinion that the book in question is calculated to deprave public morals," and allowed their foreman to present a verdict of guilty under the indictment. Probably no metropolitan jury would now come "unanimously" to the degrading conclusion that to spread specific physiological knowledge is to deprave public morals, even if the members were the "average sensual men" who habitually circulate and gloat upon lewd anecdotes, to say nothing of their acts. It is true that the abominable imputations packed into the indictment of Bradlaugh and Mrs Besant were repeated in the miserable prosecution¹⁰⁸ which took place at Newcastle in 1892; and that the Recorder who tried that case, Judge Digby Seymour, displayed gross prejudice at every stage of the trial, finally vilifying such a perfectly well-meant and well-done treatise as Dr Allbutt's "Wife's Handbook," and the old "Fruits of Philosophy," as "two of the filthiest works that could be circulated to debauch and demoralise the minds of the people." Odious aspersions of this kind represent merely the fanaticism of ignorant custom, and take no heed of the enormous harm which physiological ignorance breeds. The Solicitor-General in the Knowlton trial flatly refused to deal with any such considerations; and Judge Seymour similarly would listen to no rational argument. But a decisive current of public opinion now begins to set the other way. Even a number of clergymen now admit the frightful evils of over-breeding, and are thus at least in part disentitled to cry out against rational prudence. The Newcastle prosecution, moreover, was strongly condemned in the local press; the accused was liberated; and at a public indignation meeting one speaker declared, with applause, that "the verdict of Judge Digby Seymour was an insult and a libel upon their English manners." And though a Neo-Malthusian student was heavily fined¹⁰⁹ in London in the previous year for circulating information in a slightly irregular manner, the language of the counsel for the Crown, who declared that "the only check against immorality in this country is the fear of pregnancy," excited general indignation, as did the conduct of the magistrate in ruling that decent language was "obscene." This prosecution, too, was repented of; and the most direct journalistic challenge afterwards failed to bring on any prosecution of Neo-Malthusian doctrine as such.

Even the comparatively reasonable attitude of Sir Alexander Cockburn in the "Knowlton" trial would not now recommend itself at all points to educated people. In the hearing of the evidence he thought fit to suggest that only "strong-minded ladies" could acquire medical knowledge without becoming "less pure-minded." Nor would any thoughtful people now agree with him and the Solicitor-General that "no better tribunal can be found in the world to judge of such a question as this than the average sound sense and enlightened judgment which is to be found in English society." These flights of declamation on the Bench are part of the general cant of English society, which can decorously endorse the moral reflections of a judge whose own life is the subject of chronic and much-relished scandal. But Cockburn at least put a new obstacle in the way of legal molestation of honest propaganda by expressing his agreement with the Malthusian doctrine as to over-population; and the later judgment of Judge Windeyer in Victoria, vindicating Mrs Besant's "Law of Population" when it was prosecuted there, marks the turn of the legal tide.

§ 3

The constructive policy which Bradlaugh joined with his Neo-Malthusian doctrine had for its main item the radical reform of the land laws. He was thus in practical harmony with those individualists who except the land from the operation of the individualist principle, though he did not declare like them for land nationalisation. Nationalisation he considered too vast and difficult a transaction in the present state of political evolution; but progressive interference with the land monopoly he held to be as practicable as it is necessary. Property in land, he held with Mill, "is only valid in so far as the proprietor of the land is its improver; when private property in land is not expedient it is unjust." And the control of the land, in his opinion, must become the subject of a great and decisive struggle between the people and the landowning class, who may or may not be aided by the rest of the capitalist class. On this subject he felt no less strongly, though he always spoke with more restraint, than do Socialists with regard to capitalism pure and simple.

"It is for the use of air, moisture, and heat," he puts it, "for the varied natural forces, that the cultivator pays; and the receiver talks of the rights of property. We shall have for the future to talk in this country of the rights of life – rights which must be recognised, even if the recognition involves the utter abolition of the present landed aristocracy."¹¹⁰

And he could say of the landed class, what can hardly be said of the labour-employing class in the main, that they had stood in the way of every reform:

"The great rent-takers have been the opponents of progress; they have hindered reform; they kept the taxes on knowledge; they passed combination laws; they enacted long Parliaments; they made the machinery of Parliamentary election costly and complicated, so as to bar out the people. They have prevented education, and then have sneered at the masses for their ignorance. All progress in the producing power of labour has added to the value of land; and yet the landowner, who has often stood worse than idly by while the land has increased in value, now talks of the labourer as of the lower herd which must be checked and restrained."

To carry out in legislation the principle of the common interest in the land was accordingly one of his main aims; and at the time when his illegal exclusion from Parliament forced him to concentrate all his energies in the struggle for bare political life, he had gone far to give effect to it. Early in 1880 he took the leading part in establishing the Land Law Reform League, of which the formulated objects were: —

"1. In case of intestacies, the same law to govern the distribution of real and personal property. This would destroy primogeniture, but to be useful would need to be followed by some limitation of the power of devise, say as in France.

"2. Abolition of the right to settle or entail for non-existing lives. It would be far better to abolish, all life estates …

"3. Transfer of land to be made as cheap and easy as the transfer of a ship. Security to be ensured by compulsory registration of all dealings with land …

"4. Abolition of all preferential rights of landlords over other creditors…

"5. Abolition of the Game Laws.

"6. Compulsory cultivation of all lands now uncultivated, and not devoted to public purposes, which are cultivable with profit. That is, make it a misdemeanour to hold cultivable lands in an uncultivated state. The penalty on conviction to be dispossession, but with payment to dispossessed landowners of say twenty years' purchase of the average annual value of the land for the seven years prior to the prosecution. The payment to be by bonds of the State bearing the same interest as the Consolidated Debt, and payable to bearer. The land to be State property, and to be let to actual tenant cultivators on terms of tenancy … longer or shorter according to the improvement made in the estate. The amount paid as rent to the State to be applied to the payment of the interest and to form a sinking fund for the liquidation of the principal.

"7. Security to the tenant-cultivator for improvements.

"8. Re-valuation of lands for the more equitable imposition of the land-tax.

 

"9. Land-tax to be levied on a scale so graduated as to press most heavily on excessively large holdings.

"10. One and the same land law for Great Britain and Ireland."

Within a few months this League, numbering among its Vice-Presidents four clergymen, two of them belonging to the State Church, had established a number of strong branches, enrolled members, and affiliated societies representing many thousands more, thus attracting an amount of notice in the press which promised important results. An illustration of the effect produced may be seen in a letter which Mr Ruskin thought worthy of insertion in Fors Clavigera: —

"May I take an advantage of this note, and call your attention to a fact of much importance to Englishmen? and it is this. On reference to some Freethought papers – notably the National Reformer– I find a movement on foot amongst the Atheists, vigorous and full of life, for the alteration of the Land Laws in our much-loved country. It is a movement of much moment, and likely to lead to great results. The first great move on the part of Charles Bradlaugh, the premier in the matter, is the calling of a conference to discuss the whole question. The meeting is to be attended by all the National Secular Society's branches throughout the empire; representatives of nearly every Reform Association in England, Scotland, and Ireland; deputations from banded bodies of workmen, colliers, etc. – such as the important band of Durham miners – Trade Unionists, and, in fact, a most mighty representative conference will be gathered together. I am, for many reasons, grieved and shocked to find the cry for Reform coming with such a heading to the front. Where are our statesmen —our clergy? The terrible crying evils of our land system are coming to the front in our politics without the help of the so-called upper classes; nay, with a deadly hatred of any disturbance in that direction, our very clergy are taking up arms against the popular cry.

"Only a week ago I was spending a few days with a farmer near Chester, and learned to my sorrow and dismay that the Dean and Chapter of that city, who own most of the farms, etc., in the district where my friend resides, refuse now – and only now– to accept other than yearly tenants for these farms; have raised all the rents to an exorbitant pitch, and only allow the land to be sown with wheat, oats, or whatever else in seed, etc., on a personal inspection by their agent. The consequences of all this is that poverty is prevailing to an alarming extent; the workers all the bitter, hard toil; the clergy, one may say, all the profits. It is terrible, heart-breaking; I never longed so much for heart-searching, vivid eloquence, so that I might move men with an irresistible tongue to do the right."

It is vain now to guess what the movement might have done if Bradlaugh, who was its main force, had been left free to carry it on continuously. But, on the one hand, his overwhelming contest with the House of Commons forced him to put aside an undertaking which depended so much on a seat in that House; and on the other hand, to say nothing of the precedence inevitably given to the Irish land question in Parliament, it cannot be questioned that the fall in agricultural land values took much of the wind out of the sails of English land reformers. The phenomenon of land going out of cultivation put a new face on the dispute. When Bradlaugh at length got his seat, he at once showed his continued grasp of the problem by introducing a Bill for the Compulsory Cultivation of Waste Land, the principle of which was, that wherever land of more than one hundred acres lay uncultivated, and not used for public pleasure,¹¹¹ while cultivable with profit by a cultivator paying no rent, or a smaller rent than the landlord held necessary to make it worth his while to lease, the Commissioners of Woods and Forests should be empowered to take possession of such land and offer it for tenancy. The keeping of the land uncultivated was to be a misdemeanour; but the dispossessed owner was to receive in compensation an annual payment for twenty-five years of a sum representing the average annual value of the land during the fourteen years prior to his dispossession, whatever that might be. The justification given by Bradlaugh for making it a misdemeanour to hold land idle was that already it was a misdemeanour for a labourer to live as an idle vagrant, and that the law insisted on his utilising his labour power. If labour, then a fortiori land. In introducing this measure Bradlaugh emphatically maintained that if the land would not yield the "three profits" of Lord Beaconsfield's formula, it ought not to be allowed to be kept idle and useless by the landlord. So long as a cultivator could make his profit, the State was bound to give him the opportunity. Needless to say, the Bill was violently denounced by the Conservative press. The Times talked of "downright plunder." The Spectator was especially indignant on the score that "great properties in the home counties, kept waste in the hope that London will build on them, would be confiscated"; and that and other journals held it a sufficient objection that in cases where land had been worth nothing the landlord would get nothing. Many Liberal members further objected that a Bill of such importance ought not to be introduced by a private member; and generally there was more hostility than help. On its discussion in the House (April 1886) Bradlaugh agreed to withdraw the Bill on the ground that its machinery was insufficient, he having come to the opinion that provision should be made for the lending of money to moneyless men to enable them to cultivate on their own behalf. In 1887, still seeing no hope of carrying a Bill, he took the course of moving a resolution on the motion for going into Committee of Supply, reaffirming the principle that "the right of ownership carries with it the duty of cultivation," and proposing to empower the "local authorities" to act as in the Bill of 1886 he had proposed to make the Commissioners of Woods and Forests act. This time he had considerable support, his resolution getting 101 votes, to 175 against. Not one of the front bench Liberals voted; but the Irish Home Rulers did so in considerable force, making some amends for old hostility.¹¹² Again, in 1888, he moved a modified resolution, proposing to empower local authorities to purchase compulsorily waste lands at the "capital agricultural value." This time, some hours having been lost by a Scotch motion for the adjournment of the House on a point affecting crofters, the discussion came to nothing, the House being counted out while it was in process. Those who were behind the scenes may be able to give the explanation of the apathy of the Liberal and Radical members generally. The passing of an Allotments Act by the Conservative Government may have had something to do with it. Be that as it may, Bradlaugh again in March 1889 gave notice of a resolution on the subject, this time proposing to give local authorities power to levy a "waste and vacant land rate," or in the alternative, to acquire the land by payment either "for a limited term of an annual sum not exceeding the then average net annual actual produce," or of a sum representing the capital agricultural value. This resolution, however, never came to discussion. He again put it down in 1890, immediately after his return from India, but again it failed to reach discussion. In 1891 his work was over.

It will be seen that his land policy was more advanced than any that has yet been put in force by the Liberal party, though the legislation of 1894 has advanced considerably towards the adoption of his principle of compulsion. To that principle later legislators must inevitably come; and as regards land not utilised it has irresistible force. The proper answer to the demands of landlords for protection against the import of cheap corn from land paying no rent in America, is that when land goes out of cultivation here owing to such competition making it fail to yield its old rent, or three profits, the opportunity of cultivating it should pass to the State, which may fitly try the experiment of placing on such land the labourers who are driven to swell the crowd of unemployed in the towns. But this answer has never yet been effectively made in politics.¹¹³ The doctrine of the nation's ownership of its land needs apparently to be asserted to-day more emphatically than ever.

Asserting it as he did, Bradlaugh represented a midway position between out-and-out Socialism and out-and-out Individualism. Time will show whether it was on the line to be taken by progressive reform. What is clear is that if energetically adopted it may soon lead to the complete overthrow of that land system which is the foundation of the reactionary party politics of this country. In his pamphlet on "The Land, the People, and the Coming Struggle," Bradlaugh put very clearly the social ideal he had in view. "The enormous estates of the few landed proprietors," he declared, "must not only be prevented from growing larger, they must be broken up. At their own instance, and gradually, if they will meet us with even a semblance of fairness, for the poor and hungry cannot well afford to fight; but at our instance, and rapidly, if they obstinately refuse all legislation." To this end he proposed, as we have seen, re-valuation of all lands, and a graduated land-tax, to press most heavily on the largest holdings. The Budget of 1894, although stopping short of graduation of the annual taxes, has made the first step towards them by graduating the death duties; and the further steps are probably not far off. The broad political problem of the future is the control of wealth distribution, to the end of making the rendering of services a condition of the enjoyment of services for all able-bodied persons; and it seems fairly clear that the easiest of the various possible main steps towards that consummation are the restriction of private property in land and the indirect or direct absorption of "economic rent" by the State, such adaptations being to the socialisation of other means of wealth production as the simple to the complex. And while Bradlaugh, as has been said, stipulated for gradual action even in the regulation of the land, he never refused to contemplate the nationalisation of its rent as an ultimate ideal.

§ 4

It may now be easily inferred how Bradlaugh came to feel for the popular Socialism of the day a mixture of distrust and aversion. It was for him a flying off at a tangent from the right spiral line of progress. He had counted on seeing the slowly-won political power of the mass of the people turned to the enforcement of fundamental reforms in taxation and land-tenure, so as to better the life-conditions of the people in the mass; and he had trusted to a gradual learning of the lesson of family prudence, with the result of an immense saving of friction, waste, and misery. When he had got to the front of the political struggle, the needed reforms were still nearly all to make; and the great lesson of conjugal prudence was only beginning to be learned on a large scale. What was wanted, to his mind, was a combination of energy with patience. He had no belief in the possibility of raising the lot of vast masses of people to a high level suddenly by violent legislation for the direct transfer of all property from the "haves" to the "have-nots": he knew how enormously difficult it was to effect even the modifying measures for which he was working. But he believed that with persistent toil and good sense it might so be carried out that the life of the people should in the next generation be greatly improved, and the stress of their life materially lessened. Just at this stage, however, he saw the struggling people suddenly and vociferously appealed to by teachers who taught the uselessness of all gradual action; the futility of all preceding parliamentary effort; the impossibility of any improvement so long as private property in any of the means of production subsisted; the limitation of the alternatives to the whole loaf or no bread; the necessity of subjecting all industrial action whatever to collective control at one sweep; in a word, the absolute necessity of effecting at a stroke, by violence if need be, such a social and moral revolution as the world had never yet seen. Already the folly of all this is recognised by many even of those who resent Bradlaugh's popular exposure of it. Within ten years there has been developed in England a progressive Socialism which repudiates violence, substitutes evolution for revolution, proposes to utilise all the existing political machinery, is glad of gradual advance, is content to urge forward Radicalism, and modifies mathematical politics by biological conceptions. But Bradlaugh had to bear the brunt of the anger not only of the heated crowd who had shouted for the impossible, but of the new sentimental journalists who had patronised them.

First he had been constantly and violently abused, in the early days of his Parliamentary struggle, as being himself a Socialist, by people who knew nothing whatever about his life and doctrine; and his alleged Socialism was one of the pretexts on which some opposed his entry into the House of Commons. The nobleman who then represented the historic name of Percy took that line. A fair sample of the current tone on the subject among the ignorant rich is supplied by their votes vates sanctissima, the lady novelist "Ouida," in a letter to the Fortnightly Review,¹¹⁴ in which she discussed the class politics of Italy. "It is the towns," she explained, "which are the centres of eagerness for unconsidered war, and the foolish credulity of bombastic Radicalism;" and she went on in her best-informed manner to particularise "the 'educated' cad of the Turin or Florence streets, who has heard just enough of Fourier and Bradlaugh to think that society ought to maintain at ease his ugly idleness." The idleness which felt sure of its beauty was naturally resentful. All the while, Bradlaugh was at sharp strife with the Socialists of the moment; and he soon came to be applauded for his course in this matter by the same precious upper-class opinion which had just imputed to him the views he assailed, while new assailants vituperated him as a traitor to principles he had never accepted. It is largely to his destructive criticism that the undefined fashionable Socialism of the present hour owes its comparative rationality;¹¹⁵ but there is small thought of acknowledging the service.

Certainly he had struck hard, and this not merely because he was iniquitously and ferociously attacked by Socialists generally.¹¹⁶ He saw the new doctrine appealing to and applauded by, not the clear-headed and self-controlled workers, but the neurotic, the noisy, the passionate, the riotous. Instead of meetings of men at once earnest and orderly, such as he had gathered and addressed for so many years, meetings at which debate could go on without disorder, he saw gatherings of wildly excited men, who could not listen to opposition, who could not sit still in their seats when their view were countered, and who turned a public debate into a public disturbance. Significantly enough, the one town in which the Socialist party, even when pretty numerous, can be trusted to give an opponent a fair hearing, is Northampton, where for so many years he disciplined the workers to orderly activity, and to self-control under extreme provocation. No cause ever needed such discipline more than that of Socialism. It is quite reasonable to plead for consideration for men whose life is hard, and who see idlers at their ease; but extenuating circumstances do not affect the stream of tendency; and no amount of sympathy with the luckless can make up for want of judgment in those who undertake to lead them. And to talk, as so many of the Socialist talkers did a dozen or less years ago, of resorting to physical force, to revolutionise society, was only to expose the luckless to new disaster.

Whether all Bradlaugh's argumentation against Socialist theory will hold good is another question. It is probable that the extreme statements of Socialist doctrine with which he had to deal led him latterly to define his Individualism at times more sharply than before. Not many years before his death he declined to dub himself either Individualist or Socialist. He sought to legislate for an evolving society, conditioned by all sorts of anomalous survivals; and he must prescribe for each juncture or trouble in view of all the facts of the case. As he put it in his pamphlet on "Parliament and the Poor": —

"All progressive legislation in this country is necessarily compromise. It is not possible to legislate on hard and fast lines of principle alone. A state of things has grown up through generations which can only be gradually changed. The expedient has to be considered in all lawmaking. Legal interpretations of right have received judicial sanction, which have become so much part of our general political and social system that sudden reversal would be attended often with the gravest mischief. Temporary concessions have usually to be made on the one side, to win consent from the other, to a sure step in advance; but no compromise is final."

But the affirmation by Socialists of principles which seemed to make an end of self-reliance and self-determination led him to offer definitions of the sphere of Government; and while his concrete decisions – as in the case of the Eight Hours movement – will probably be found to be in all cases sagacious, it may be that political science will yet endorse action which he declined to contemplate. His practical justification is that his Socialist adversaries always argued the case in vacuo, and demanded the nationalisation of all the means of production, and, by consequence, the State determination of all destinies, at a time when not only is the public in the terms of the case still largely predatory and anti-social in instinct, but the Socialists themselves are divided by incurable animosities. Mr Hyndman chose to debate with him on the issue, "Will Socialism benefit the English People?" – "if resorted to here and now" being implied. Only when it is asked, "Can we evolve up to Socialism?" will Bradlaugh's rebuttal be got rid of.

What may perhaps be urged against him, as against land nationalisers from Mill onwards, is that the theory which makes land the main matter is partly undermined by the economic evolution in which agricultural land values in this country have receded, the food supply being more and more derived from abroad, in return for exported goods. On this head, however, it may here suffice to answer that that is in all likelihood a temporary phase; that in any case, English industry rests on the coal supply, which is a matter of land in the economic sense; and that a Socialism which thinks to maintain a forever increasing population, on the basis of a mere national workshop system, is much more short-sighted than the doctrine which makes the land the fulcrum of all industrial movement.

There is just one criticism of Bradlaugh's politics which the present writer will not undertake to meet, since it raises a point on which he was driven to differ from him. It is the objection to the optimistic assumption that the mass of the people can surmount the trouble of chronic trade-depression by means of thrift. This was perhaps the one touch of uncritical optimism in Bradlaugh's political system. He argued that the workers could acquire all necessary capital for themselves by simple saving. "You can earn it," he tells them, at the close of his lecture on "Capital and Labour," – "the Rothschilds' wealth, the Overstones' wealth, the Barings' wealth – you, the millions, if you are only loyal to yourselves and to one another, may put all this into your own Savings Banks, and your own friendly societies, and your own trades unions, within a dozen years. You accumulate it for others: you can do it for yourselves." The answer to this is that the capital in question depends for its continuance on the continuance of industrial production, and of the demand for the product; whereas, if the workers were to stint their consumption to the extent of saving great masses of capital from wages, they would to that extent check their total production, unless, that is, the other classes increase their consumption to a balancing extent; which, however, they could not conceivably do. Even if the birth-rate be so checked as to lessen the nett population, the increasing power of machinery would so far balance the lessened supply of labour that the tactic of parsimony on a large scale would defeat itself. At present the successful savers are so in virtue of the ill-luck of other investors and the non-saving of the mass. Saving all round would neutralise itself, since the saving could only be profitably invested in production to meet increasing demand, whereas in the terms of the case there would be decreasing demand. It is spending that keeps the machine going, not saving.

But supposing this criticism to be valid – and there are still but few who will endorse it – the final estimate of Bradlaugh, as of any politician, must be in terms of comparison; and if he has erred on the theory of thrift, so have all the statesmen of his time; while on other great issues on which they were backward, he was alert and enlightened. Even the Socialists who oppose him, and throw at him the ancient epithet of "Manchester," have in many cases committed themselves to the Manchester school's doctrine of saving, deriding those who contravene it. And on the concrete issues on which they were opposed to him, it is not difficult to show that Manchesterism had the right end of the stick. On the Eight Hours' question, in particular, the Socialist attack on him is not only subversive of other Socialist doctrine, but is a reductio ad absurdum. He is accused of inconsistency, because he wrought for State interference with the relations of labour and capital in his Truck Act, but opposed State regulation of working hours. But, on the one hand, the two cases are fundamentally different, since working hours depend on the whole economic situation, while Truck is an arbitrary arrangement of the masters, only possible in peculiar local circumstances; and on the other hand, if the Truck Act logically commits us to interference with working time, then a time law will logically commit us to a wages law, which even the Socialist critic admits to be folly.