Charles Bradlaugh

“ Some of you are younger sons of noble families, some military men, and many lawyers desiring advancement; there are, alas! few out of your number who even desire to represent the people, and those of you who are really fair parliamentary representatives are only enough to mark the wretched character of the bulk. You are a House of Commons in name, but not in fact; and if you seek to prevent the reform which shall make our constitution a reality, you will provoke a revolution which shall sweep away your obstinate policy of obstructiveness. ”

“ The present struggle is not between the people and the Tories, it is one against both Whig and Tory—it is between you, the Parliament, and the people; for you do not represent the nation, you have made yourselves a class against the nation. Some of you may be the nominees of dukes, earls, marquises, and barons for boroughs in which the voters are political serfs, and to such of you I declare that you are a dishonour to our country, a disgrace to our House of Commons. ”

“ To those of you who owe your seats to your money, and who have bribed the miserable shopkeepers and beer-sellers who gave you in return your position as temporary legislators, I declare that you are worse criminals than the thieves whose offences are recorded in our ordinary calendars of crime. The educated scoundrels of rank and fashion, who corrupt and degrade the political vitality of a nation by bribing voters, ought to be subjected to the most severe and degrading punishments. ”

“ A peer whose marquisate or dukedom had its foundation in a king's lust, and a woman's pretty face and lack of virtue, may be pardoned for not knowing what ought to constitute the true nobility of a nation. An earldom going back to the times when might governed in lieu of law, and force was the substitute for reason, does not necessarily bring to its modern holder the purest ideas of honesty and justice. A peer's estate acquired from an ill-gotten pension, must be a sad dead weight in the race for real honour. ”

“ The people desire peace, not strife. Each hour wasted in out-door agitation means less bread earned for the wife and family at home. I entreat you, my Lords, prolong not the conflict till the popular patience is entirely exhausted. Forget that you are lords, and meet your fellows like men, and in such a meeting the wrongs of the past would be forgotten, and the hopes of the future would alone be regarded. ”

“ The Tory traditions will not permit any amity with real reform; Whig history speaks more of enfranchisement for the middle classes, than of any disposition to grant political freedom to the toiling millions. The nation are growing tired and disgusted with the part of lookers, on during parliamentary struggles between one or other great Whig family and its following, and one or other great Tory family and its adherents, struggles which are contests for office rather than endeavours for political advancement, and which end in nothing but delay. ”

“ There are some Lords who, from their special position, ought not only to listen to the people, but who might fairly be expected to advocate the popular cause. I mean those who have risen from comparatively low estate by means of a most honourable profession to the judicial bench, and so have gained their baron's title; but even here are found a large minority who have eaten party dirt in their path to national dignity. The senate chamber of a nation should be the place of assemblage of the élite of the nation. ”

“ This advocacy of a refusal to pay taxes may seem to you the advocacy of a measure violent and extreme; believe me, it is no more violent, no more extreme, than your refusal to permit the tax-payers to share in the election of those whose decision determines the amount and nature of the taxation. ”

“ My object in this address is to suggest to you the unadvisability of a longer resistance on your part to the popular demand, a demand which has hitherto been expressed with much moderation, and to point out to you, how you—if you refuse to listen to the pleading cry for political life—may be compelled to do immediate justice to the nation. ”

“ The mass of the people being kept without votes, they are politically dead, they are servants not citizens, serfs not freemen. No man is justified in resigning any of the rights or neglecting any of the duties of his citizenship, much less are any privileged few justified in combining to prevent the mass of the nation from acquiring political rights or performing political duties. ”

“ Why should a man shamelessly profess to represent a borough and talk in a debate of his constituents, when in his heart of hearts he well knows that he only represents a marquis or a duke, and that the inhabitants of the borough for which he nominally sits had no more voice in his selection than they had in the choice of any other portion of the following of the Most Noble the Marquis of Telle-telle? ”

“ At first, your parliamentary system was strong enough in its tyranny, and base enough in its cowardice, to sentence men to transportation for the honest advocacy of manhood suffrage and for denunciation of governmental corruption. But 1867 is freer than 1793, and Muir, Margarot, and Winterbottom, would have been safe to-day in their advocacy of Parliamentary Reform. Our brethren of labour, rough-handed and warm-hearted, have, despite your opposition, done something to raise themselves socially during the last half century. ”

“ We do not conspire to-day and plan revolt in secret for miserable spies to report to you; we debate our proposed course in public, and you may read the story in the cheap press which the poor man cheapened against your will. We gather on the green sward—we shall have to gather there as a People's Parliament, denying that you are the parliament of the nation ”

“ To you, gentlemen of the House of Commons, I shall speak with more freedom. You ought to be the representatives of the people, and should therefore be at least sometimes accustomed to hear plain language from unpolished men. ”

“ The will of the individual or the wishes of a petty class, however rich, have not, nor can they have any right to negate and destroy the national will. The few have no lawful authority or excuse for usurping to themselves, as a sort of family privilege, the right to govern the many. Lawful Government only existing with the concurrence or possibility of concurrence of the whole of the inhabitants of the country, all other Government is unlawful usurpation and tyranny. These are propositions which the nation regards as too clear for further disputation, and which it will soon seek to enforce ”

“ Our revolution can legitimately commence by cutting off the supplies, and this may be done by turning the tax-gatherer from the door from one end of England to the other. All imperial rates might be resolutely refused, and as large landowners might increase their rentals to meet extraordinary taxation, it would become necessary to take measures to prevent the continuance of any indirect taxation until a real Reform measure be carried. ”

“ In a thieves' kitchen the suspicion of the adroit practice of pocket-picking is no disgrace, and in the House of Commons it is apparently no greater disgrace to be suspected of having obtained one's seat in Parliament by adroit bribery. ”

“ At the present moment in Great Britain, where vast wealth and frightful poverty jostle in the streets, an enormous amount of taxation, much of which is extravagantly and uselessly expended, is levied on the country, and the great share of this burden of taxation ultimately and truly falls upon the unrepresented millions. ”

“ You can no longer fight our movement by the help of police-concocted treasons: the day is past when such wretched tools of your class governments as the infamous Edwards, or an Oliver, or a Castles, or a Popay might with lying tongue hinder our progress and murder our movement. ”

“ No hereditary legislators should crowd its narrow limits, but it should be filled by life peers chosen for their manhood, for their intellect, for their courage, for their patriotism, for their devotion to their country's welfare. ”

“ Threats of eviction from a large landholder are often as potent as a bribe in influencing a vote, and it must be a strange sense of honour which permits a man to sit as the representative of voters who have to record their votes or lose their farms. ”

“ An individual whose baron's dignity was called into being, under the corrupt administration of Pitt, in order to vote down all wise and liberal measures, ought not, I admit, to be required to hold any very superior views as to legislative duties. ”

“ From 1790 till to-day, this reform movement has been gradually growing stronger and wiser, and it is now too strong to be pushed aside any longer, and the men who compose it are too wise to permit you to trifle with it further. ”

“ Disraeli desires that the governing class shall still remain a class unconnected with the people. The late Chancellor of the Exchequer while professing, and as I believe honestly professing, a wish for wide enfranchisement—uneducated by the failure of his last bill, which we supported for its honest intent rather than for any benefit it gave us—adheres to a half-hearted and contemptible rating qualification. ”

“ Some of you represent banking interests, some of you are the advocates of insurance interests, many of you are the advocates of railway enterprise, or have your seats to watch the interests of docks or gas companies. ”

“ You vote to continue the infamous practice of flogging in the army, and, much as I object to the use of the lash, I would vote to introduce it amongst our fashionable M.P.'s who have paid for the votes by which their return has been ensured. If there had been no other reason for the agitation for reform in the representation of the people, it would have been found in the fact that men who have been morally convicted of bribery sit on the benches of St. ”