Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner

“ We come back to the common plea of all the antagonists of Neo-Malthusianism—that there is no need to check over-breeding at present—a position so crudely unreasonable, so irreconcilable with any knowledge of the great facts of the case, that it is a mystery how it can be taken up by candid and well-informed men. No amount of demonstration that the world might feed all its inhabitants can do away with the dreadful fact that myriads of babes are actually born into the world every year only to die of the troubles made by poverty ”

“ There is a woman going up and down the country lecturing, and may be in London city at this moment, and she proudly cries out that there is no God, and she takes out her watch and says, 'Now, if there be a God, I give him five minutes to strike me dead,' and she coolly stands watching the hand of her watch dial, and because she is not struck dead by the time she stipulates, she cries out that there is no God; and working men run after this woman, and pay for listening to this ginger-beer blasphemy, and the ravings of a half-drunken woman. ”

“ Why should you have reserved your fervent indignation against apparent insincerity in sacred things to be expended upon a man whose admission to the House as silently as possible, so as not to promote his notoriety, justice and expediency would alike have suggested: the whole stupidity, duplicity, and inhumanity of Conservative tactics in this matter are patent to all straightforward minds. You are responsible for giving Mr Bradlaugh a name and a place in the history of this country which will survive long after those of the present Conservative leaders are consigned to oblivion. ”

“ 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. ”

“ If that be so, Bradlaugh's name must stand still higher, in that it represents not only the principle of the rights of constituencies, but the principle of freedom of conscience in the last and most serious issue. And in every moral respect, Bradlaugh's case stands above that of Wilkes. The point in which they best compare is their courage; but even the undoubted courage with which Wilkes faced an unpopular king and unpopular ministers was a less rare thing than the fortitude which faced the hate and the slander of half of the more articulate part of the nation. ”

“ He addresses himself to all parts of the house—gallery as well as body. When warmed by his subject, he advances to the centre of the platform, and looking his audience full in the face, and with right hand emphasizing every important sentence, he expresses himself in tones so commanding and words so distinct that his hearers may be hostile or friendly, but cannot be indifferent. One may retire horrified at his sentiments, even disgusted at his irreverence and audacity—from a Christian's standpoint—but no one would go to sleep under him. ”

“ The Atheist simply stands honestly to the conclusions which such Theists have avowedly come to and then feebly let go.
This is so obvious to steady-minded people that in all philosophic ages there have been some who, shunning the name rather than the reality of Atheism, have formulated the doctrine and name of Pantheism. Between logical Pantheism and Atheism, however, it cannot be too strongly affirmed, there is no difference save in name. An Atheist believes in a "going" and infinite universe, the totality of which he cannot pretend to understand ”

“ What was more, Bradlaugh had only specified the Evidence Amendment Acts in reply to the express challenge of the Clerk of the House of Commons. To turn an accidental ambiguity to the account of an iniquity, to decide that a man was untrustworthy under the pretext of a legal subterfuge, was merely to show that the oath is less than no security for right action, and that under its cover men can far outgo the lengths of injustice that they are likely to venture on in the name of simple law. ”

“ Not a word is said of excluding unbelievers. On the contrary, it was only with difficulty that the legislature could be got to meet the fact that there were many Atheists who at times had to give testimony in courts of law. Had the legislature really desired to exclude all Atheists from oath-taking it would surely have said so, knowing as it must have done how common unbelieving oath-taking had been. And all the judges, as individuals, must have known perfectly well that privately known Atheists had sat in every Parliament for generations. ”

“ What the utilitarian principle has done for Bradlaugh and those like-minded is not to give them the primary impulse to fight for truth and right as they see them, but to give them an enduring support in the battle. The first impulse springs from veracity of character plus knowledge; but it is sure to be opposed by bitter criticism, imputing to the straightforward course all manner of evil results. When the reformer is convinced that not only truth and justice but the highest utility itself is on his side, he is thrice armed. ”

“ The Atheist admits that he can form no conception whatever of Infinite and Eternal Power. The Theist rushes in where the Atheist declines to tread. And nothing is more remarkable in the modern history of religion than the retreat of all theistic argument to some form of the sub-rational position so laboriously formulated by Kant—that the God-idea is established, not by any form of reasonable inference from knowledge, but by the moral needs and constitution of human nature. ”

“ Rationalism once for all excludes the last factor; and if it ever lends itself to a popular disregard of the great utilities and a pursuit of the small, which are the undoing of the great, it will assuredly not be in virtue of following such a lead as Bradlaugh's.
Of his influence on his followers those can best speak who have mixed with them. Personal and magnetic as it was, it depended for its continuance on the unvarying nobility of his appeal to the best instincts—to courage, honour, justice, and the love of truth. ”

“ The most direct confutation of that doctrine is supplied by the simple fact of the persistence of the Congress movement, which at its outset the sentimentalists scouted as a chimera. Whatever may be its outcome, they are for ever discredited, in that they declared the thing itself, when broached, to be impossible. And those whose sociology goes deeper and wider than a rule-of-thumb acquaintance with part of the actual life of a race or a region are aware that India can no more than any other land resist the laws of social transmutation, given the transmuting forces and conditions. ”

“ It is significant of the worth of common opinion that Wilkes was much more readily forgiven for real and ill-meant and undisputed obscenity than was Bradlaugh for the earnest and scrupulous defence of true doctrines infamously miscalled obscene. On the point of politics, Wilkes is hardly more justly notable than on the point of character. He had no higher mission than to attack an autocratic and unpopular minister; his very animus was partly the evil and vulgar spirit of racial animosity; he had no high purpose of political reform. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But he was profoundly impressed by the extravagance of Owen's estimate of the present possibilities of human nature; and the later Socialism, like the earlier, represented for him the optimism of unpractical men, with the difference that the later agitators had at once much less gift for social organisation than Owen, and a far more difficult programme to realise. Thus, where Owen set himself to create a State within the State, Bradlaugh addressed himself to making the political State truly democratic—a course the wisdom of which is admitted by the action of the Socialists, who now adopt it. ”

“ For him, creed was action, and action creed. He was so thoroughly a man of action that he must needs act on his conviction in matters of opinion, so called, as in anything else.
It was no doubt the record and the result of the French Revolution that moved the majority of political reformers for two generations to keep their own counsel on religious matters. Paine has been expressly charged with hindering the cause of democratic politics by identifying himself also with the cause of Freethinking. To a man like Bradlaugh such an objection counted for nothing. ”

“ Bradlaugh now brought out another no less precious anomaly, namely, that the Speaker, at the opening of Parliament, must of necessity administer the oath to himself; and that the first forty members must positively break the law, seeing that they swear while there is not a "full House" sitting. Another curious issue was raised by the Court. An unbeliever could certainly be punished for perjury; how, then, could his oath be "no oath," when perjury expressly meant false testimony given on oath? Sir Hardinge Giffard's answer was that no man may "take profit from his own wrong." ”

“ If we are merely to discuss secular things, there is no need for any "Secularist" organisation. Secularists commonly act freely—or as freely as they are allowed to—with their religious neighbours in political and other public matters. But if a distinct doctrine of the uselessness of "sacred" machinery and theory is to be maintained; if it is to be shown that secular action is properly co-extensive with human affairs, then these views must be upheld by showing that all theology is delusive. ”

“ In virtue of the qualities which made him a warm friend of Ireland, Bradlaugh was all his life, and in his latter years still more warmly, the friend of India. All his instincts of justice and sympathy were moved by the spectacle of that vast congeries of immemorially immature races, ruled by a bureaucracy of Englishmen, none of whom would for a moment be trusted to exercise similar power over their fellow-countrymen, but all of whom collectively are assumed by their countrymen to need next to no supervision when ruling a "lower" race. ”

“ Nothing, apparently, can make the majority of Christians, who claim that theirs is a "religion of love," realise that to seek to injure an Atheist for his opinions is an unworthy course. Mere Nonconformity has incurred, and still incurs, a certain measure of penalty. But Nonconformists seem none the less ready to inflict it in turn on others. Obviously, the number of middle-class people who can defy these risks is small. It is only among workmen, employed in large numbers by capitalists who do not take the trouble to inquire about their opinions, that the avowal of Secularism is safe. ”

“ Poverty, so long as it exists, is in fact the impassable barrier between man and civil and religious liberty. You can never have true liberty so long as men are steeped in poverty. So long as men do not comprehend what liberty, what freedom really is, they will be ignorant how to attain it. ”

“ People have sometimes deliberately asserted that Mrs Besant's desertion and Mr Bradlaugh's death inflicted an irremediable injury on the cause of Freethought, but this is merely an assertion, and one which will not bear a moment's investigation. Happily for the human race, the growth of public opinion does not depend upon any single man or woman, however able, however energetic, he or she may be. ”

“ Certain it is that from these malevolent outbreaks of the unsleeping Romish spirit of persecution may be dated a new birth of enmity towards Rome on the part of English rationalists, who had before been disposed to class the bloody-mindedness of Catholicism with the kindred rancours of Protestantism. It was left to Manning to put his Church in the worst light of all; to show once for all that the fundamental mission of priestly Rome is not parcere subjectis et debellare superbos, but to fight the ignoble battle of the million against one. ”

“ Of course, while men do unquestionably dislike an innovator and fighter for being more honest and plain-spoken than themselves, they do not openly put their enmity on those grounds. They must find sins and faults for him: what faults he has they will magnify and multiply. And as, of course, all of us who practise any self-criticism at all can realise that the hostilities we set up, however unjust we hold them to be, have a certain basis in our shortcomings, it is only reasonable to look for part of the pretext of Bradlaugh's enemies in his. ”

“ An ill-conditioned judge was thus free to insult Freethinking witnesses, and even a just judge was free to embarrass them by an invidious question, since the bare wording of the Act enabled and even encouraged the judge to ask them—not, as he ought to have done, whether the oath was to them unmeaning in respect of the words of adjuration, but—whether the oath as a whole would be "binding on their conscience." ”

“ The Tory argument was really a sample of the method of utilising the principle of population solely as a reason for not doing justice, while vilifying those who not only see the trouble but point out the remedy. ”

“ Well, that is "modern Materialism" or nothing; the Materialism of Büchner and of Bradlaugh. The mere doctrinal or pragmatic expressions of single physicists count for nothing. As Bradlaugh put it in his debate with the Rev. Mr Westerby, it is the cases of Ferrier that count, not his opinions. The best observer is not the best formulator or thinker; and the art or science of logical speech is not gratuitously thrown in with either mathematical or artistic faculty. To turn the data of science into philosophy is a specialist's work. ”

“ In modern England he stands out singularly as a powerful and prominent man who chose to set his face openly and systematically against what he held to be shams and delusions, though the impeaching of them brought him the bitterest hostility, the foulest calumny, and a perpetual struggle, where a mere tacit conformity would have meant manifold success, wealth, and ease. There is no country in which straightforwardness and single-mindedness are more belauded than in England, and perhaps none in which they are scarcer. ”

“ On the other hand, the utilitarian arguments against vice, properly so called, are much better fitted to impress than the religious; and they leave no such loophole as the others inevitably do in respect of the Christian doctrine of pardon for sin, to say nothing of the iniquity of the Christian ethic which holds one and the same act ruinous in a woman and venial in a man. Of course, if the celibate life, and marriage without possibility of divorce, be made the standard of virtue, rationalism is likely to give piety plenty of occasion for outcry in matters of morals, as in matters of opinion. ”

“ The Deity exists, as those I must say magnificent words set forth, in the remote, inaccessible recesses of which we know nothing, but with us it has no dealing, with us it has no relation. I have purposely gone back to ancient times, but I do not hesitate to say that the specific evil or specific form of irreligion with which in the educated society of this country you have to contend, and with respect to which you ought to be on your guard, is not blank Atheism. ”

“ But inasmuch as the people in the mass can only begin with the main or fundamental questions of religion—those of "revelation" and "inspiration," "God," "Providence," "prayer," "miracles," "morality," "atonement," and "immortality"—his platform work as a Freethinker dealt mainly with these topics. And inasmuch as the mass of the people are at once more sincere and more logical in their relation of opinion to conduct than most of the specialists who occupy themselves with the literary analysis of the Old and New Testaments, Bradlaugh's work struck at the roots of orthodoxy wherever he went. ”

“ It is not difficult to make the majority of poor men and women listen to reason on the subject; with those who say it is, the wish is father to the thought, in that they do not want to try to give the requisite knowledge. Thousands of poor women ignorantly use the most disastrous means to limit their fecundity; and extreme poverty often hampers them even where they have the knowledge. ”

“ He spoke to persuade, to convince, to crush; and he never spoke save on a conviction. It thus lay in his nature that he should be a politician as earnestly as he was a Freethinker. His Atheism, his logic, his utilitarianism, all combined to make him a strenuous reformer in the field of government, and a full half of his whole activity—more than half in the latter [Pg 163] years—was turned to making life better and saner than it had been under the regimen of religion. The absurd pretence that Atheism makes men pessimistic and supine becomes peculiarly absurd when tested by his career. ”