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

"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.