Charles Bradlaugh

“ When William O'Brien delivered that great speech in the House of Commons after his imprisonment by Mr. Balfour, with all its needless indignities, there were two men who could not restrain their tears. One was an Irish member. The other was Charles Bradlaugh. One who witnessed the scene told me it was infinitely pathetic to see that gigantic man, deemed so hard by an ignorant world, wiping away his tears at the tale of a brave man's unmerited suffering.
Mr. Bradlaugh used to attend the social parties pretty often in those old days. ”

“ Bradlaugh's first visit to America I was a frequent contributor to his journal, and I corresponded with him privately. I went down to Northampton and delivered a lecture at his request, under the auspices of his electoral committee. The old theatre—a dirty, ramshackle place as I recollect it—was crowded, and I had my first taste of the popularity of Mr. Bradlaugh in the borough. Every mention of his name excited the wildest enthusiasm. ”

“ No man of my time had such a devoted following.
The last "Bradlaugh" demonstration I attended was on February 15, 1883, in Trafalgar-square. Seventy or eighty thousand people were present. There were four speakers, and three of them are dead, Joseph Arch being the sole survivor. Mr. Adams, of Northampton, lived to see his old friend take his seat and do good work in the House of Commons, became himself Mayor of Northampton, and died universally respected by his fellow-townsmen; William Sharman, a brave, true man, is buried at Preston; and Charles Bradlaugh sleeps his long sleep at Woking. ”

“ One day, at Turner-street, he told me that a creditor of this species had coolly invited him to dinner. "Hang it," he said, "you can't dine with a man who charges you sixty per cent."
Another recollection I have of Mr. Bradlaugh is in connexion with the funeral of Mr. Austin Holyoake. The death of this gentleman was a great loss to the Freethought cause. He was highly respected by all who knew him. The geniality of his disposition was such that he had many friends and not a single enemy. For some years he was Mr. Bradlaugh's printer and publisher, and a frequent contributor to his journal. ”

“ The man is altogether too big to be passed over, if one is not to lose sight of every thing savoring of reasonable proportion. Besides, though due regard must be had to the "single life," it is of yet greater importance to consider the "type;" and a more marked type of Radicalism than that which is incarnated in Mr. Charles Bradlaugh does not exist. He is the grim captain of that section of English Radicals, far more powerful than is generally supposed, who boldly inscribe on their banner the watchwords. ”

“ Bradlaugh resigned his presidency of the National Secular Society, which he had held for so many years. The Hall of Science was packed with members, chiefly from the London district, but many of them from the provinces.
The scene was infinitely pathetic. One sentiment reigned in every heart. The Old Guard was taking leave of its General. Some of them had fought around him for thirty years, and the farewell was a mutilation of their very lives. Tears were streaming down strong faces ”

“ On the other hand, like nearly all atheists whom I have known, he is a consummate egotist. He who recognizes in nature no power greater than himself almost necessarily rises rapidly in self-esteem. There is very little room left for the Christian virtues of patience, humility, charity. Indeed, these are pretty much what Mr. Bradlaugh attributes to Christ as faults of character. There is no God, and Charles Bradlaugh is his prophet. This is the secret of his power. Not that I mean to affirm in the least that Bradlaugh's egotism is incompatible with the common weal. ”

“ Mr Charles Bradlaugh have taken the Hall for two nights, November 18th and 19th, for the sum of four guineas. Paid 21st of September 1870. Thomas Balme, Hall-keeper, liable to damages,"—he said to Mr Bradlaugh, "I shall be very glad if you can make out that the law helps you, for I think your case a very hard one. (Turning to Mr Chitty) With such a receipt and memorandum as this, having paid my four guineas, I should most certainly expect to lecture. It is very hard for the plaintiff so be defeated by the mere statement of your own servant that he had no authority." ”

“ Bradlaugh had to lecture at the Hall. I was away, and I wondered whether he would fulfil the engagement. He did fulfil it. A friend wrote to me that Mr. Bradlaugh walked through the hall and mounted the platform with a face as white and rigid as that of a statue. He made no reference or allusion to his loss, but all could see he carried a bleeding heart. His lecturing in such circumstances was characteristic. Weaker men would have indulged their grief ”

“ He had a lady on his arm, and he passed with her between himself and Mr. Bradlaugh, so that her dress trailed over the hero's feet. It was a wretched display of insolence and cowardice. But the lady must be exonerated. She looked annoyed, her cheeks reddened, and her eyelids fell. It is so hard for a woman to resist the attraction of courage, and the coward by her side must have suffered in her estimation.
There was a crowded meeting that evening at the Hall of Science, at which I had the honor of speaking, Mr. Bradlaugh's greeting was tremendous. ”

“ The four candidates addressed the meeting, but the uproar during Lord Henley's speech was so great that he could scarcely be heard, and the proceedings terminated with "three cheers for Bradlaugh."
As the weeks flew on, fiercer and fiercer grew the fight. The Lord's Day Rest Association came to the aid of the Northampton Whigs and Tories, and posted the town with placards headed: "Do not vote for Charles Bradlaugh unless you wish to lose your Sunday rest;" ”

“ At last it was alleged by the most evangelical of the disputants that Charles Bradlaugh, the most formidable atheist on the Secularist platform, had taken out his watch publicly and challenged the Almighty to strike him dead in five minutes if he really existed and disapproved of atheism. The leader of the cavillers, with great heat, repudiated this as a gross calumny, declaring that Bradlaugh had repeatedly and indignantly contradicted it, and implying that the atheist champion was far too pious a man to commit such a blasphemy. This exquisite confusion of ideas roused my sense of comedy. ”

“ The speaker said England was full of wealth, and that labour was never so well paid. Everybody was happy, and Bradlaugh was an incendiary, a story-teller, a nuisance, who would make a rumpus and make everybody miserable, even in the Garden of Eden. 'Were you ever in a casual ward?' asked a smudgy fellow in the back of the hall. 'No,' answered the bold Brindley, 'but if you were there now it would save the police trouble.' And so he replied to other impertinent questions, until he made the impression that he was not quite such a fool as he looked. ”

“ Mr. Bradlaugh rose and for the first time I saw him tremble. "My lord," he said, "you put upon me a grave responsibility." "I put no responsibility upon you," said Lord Coleridge, "it is for you to decide." And the stately judge glided away in his robes of office.
If Mr. Bradlaugh put his co-defendants in the witness-box, one of two things might happen. They might decline to give evidence, as every answer would tend to criminate themselves; or they might exculpate Mr. Bradlaugh and procure their own damnation. ”

“ It did not surprise me, on meeting him at the Cobden Workmen's Club the next evening, to learn that he had been frightfully ill. "Mr. Bradlaugh," I wrote at the time, "is a wonderfully strong man, but the Tories and the bigots are doing their best to kill him, and if this sort of thing is to continue very much longer they may succeed." Alas, they did succeed. That terrible struggle killed him. No man ever lived who could have passed through it unbroken.
Mr. Bradlaugh was clearly right on the point raised, but the jury went against him, apparently out of sheer prejudice. ”

“ It was "Bradlaugh" the multitude came for. They waited to hear him speak, they applauded him to the skies, and when he had done they dispersed. And on such occasions he was magnificent. No one can conceive the power of the man who never saw him at one of these demonstrations. ”

“ The Nonconformist members, in debating the Burials Bill, had expressed the pure Liberal doctrine that no man should be prevented from exercising a public right by his opinions on matters of conscience. When they came to deal with Charles Bradlaugh, many of them showed themselves to be as Tory in their essential habit of mind as the most bigoted vicar who ever shut out a Quaker funeral from his churchyard. Bradlaugh was a dogmatic atheist, and as honest a man as was ever elected to Parliament. ”

“ That there was nobody like Bradlaugh for an awkward emergency, was the fresh verdict of his followers.
And these things, and his shaping of his life, were all of a piece with the extraordinary effectiveness of his oratory. In tempestuous power and intensity of feeling it surpassed any that it has ever been my lot to listen to: it roused men to great thrills of sympathy apart from any of that foregone approbation which swells the cheering for so many political leaders. He could make enthusiastic followers at one hearing, and keep them for a generation. ”

“ While Professor Beesly was opening the meeting, a tall man with a remarkably pleasant face, a little spoilt by a self-sufficient look, or, if we are really to describe it, a certain consciousness of power, had entered the room and received a perfect ovation of applause. This was Mr Bradlaugh, alias 'Iconoclast,' for whom the audience kept calling whenever the speaker for the time being grew tedious.... We know more of Mr Bradlaugh than we wish. ”

“ Bradlaugh, however, began his radical career before he was of age, while Ingersoll was nearly forty before he set aside diplomacy and ceased wooing bronchitis.
Charles Bradlaugh was the first child of a worthy clerk married to a housemaid. His father never earned more than two guineas a week. All these parents ever did for their son was to supply him with physical life, and teach him by antithesis. No trace can be found that he in any mental characteristic resembled either. Parents are evidently people who are used for a purpose by a Something. ”

“ During the Northampton election times I used to take a good stiff daily walk. All through my youth I had plenty of exercise in the open air, and I still grow desperately fusty without a brisk tramp at least once in the twenty-four hours. Mr. Bradlaugh generally took a drive, and I remember telling him with youthful audacity that he ought to walk for his health's sake. ”

“ Charles Bradlaugh stayed with these solicitors until his death in 1852, when the firm testified their appreciation of his services [Pg 3] by putting an obituary notice in the Times, stating that he had been "for upwards of twenty years the faithful and confidential clerk of Messrs Lepard & Co., of 6 Cloak Lane." He married a nursemaid named Elizabeth Trimby, and on September 26th, 1833, was born their first child, who was named Charles after his father. He was born in a small house in Bacchus Walk, Hoxton. The houses in Bacchus Walk are small four-roomed tenements ”

“ No other person could do anything like justice to a most important part of the career of one whom the Tories used to call "that litigious man," when they were trying to ruin him in the law courts and he was only defending himself against their base attacks.
Those who had only known Mr. Bradlaugh as a platform orator had some difficulty in recognising him when they first met him in one of our "halls of justice." His whole manner was changed. He was polite, insinuating, and deferential. His attitude towards the judges was admirably calculated to conciliate their favor. ”

“ The ill-advised incumbent replied by informing the lad's parents that their son had turned atheist, and that he had been suspended from his functions as a Sunday-school teacher for a period of three months. It is not given to the clerical profession, as a rule, to know much about human nature; but this was an exceptional blunder. I do not know that Mr. Bradlaugh is constitutionally a doubter,—indeed, I think not; but he is a born fighter, a dialectical athlete revelling in the gaudium certaminis as a strong man rejoices to run a race. ”

“ Bradlaugh, like politicians in better repute, has a right to be judged by his "fruits." It is but too common in respectable circles to regard him as a vulgar, self-seeking demagogue. Now, demagogue he may be, but certainly not in the objectionable, accepted sense of the word. He has never concealed his anxiety to get into Parliament; but of all the roads by which St. Stephen's may be approached he has certainly chosen the least likely and the most arduous. He has been at a world of pains to spoil his own chances. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Not untruly did I write, in May, 1882, that Charles Bradlaugh was a man "who by the infliction of a great wrong had become the incarnation of a great principle"; for the agitation in the country grew and grew, until, returned again to Parliament at the General Election, he took the oath and his seat, brought in and carried an Oaths Bill, not only giving Members of Parliament the right to affirm, but making Freethinkers competent as jurymen, and relieving witnesses from the insult hitherto put upon those who objected to swearing ”