Charles Bradlaugh: a Record of His Life and Work, Volume 2 (of 2) / With an Account of his Parliamentary Struggle, Politics and Teachings. Seventh Edition

by Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner; J. M. Robertson

CHAPTER II.

POLITICAL DOCTRINE AND WORK.

§ 1.

In combining the propaganda of Freethought with that of Republican Radicalism, Bradlaugh was carrying on the work begun in England by Paine, and continued by Richard Carlile, men whose memory he honoured for those qualities of courage, sincerity, and constancy which were the pith of his own character. The bringing of reason to bear at once on the things of Church and of State, of creed and of conduct, was for him a matter of course, as it has been for the great majority of Atheists, from Holbach onwards, and he held firmly to the old conviction that for free and rational men the only right form of Government is a Republic. He had all Paine's energetic disdain of the monarchic principle in theory and in practice, and, coming to his work in the latter half of the century, he could stand up for Republicanism without incurring the extreme penalties which fell so heavily on the devoted head of Carlile that his hold of his rationalist doctrine gave way under the strain of his struggle, the mind seeking lethargic rest before the body found the final repose. Still the great reaction against the French Revolution, which had made the name of Paine a byword, and the life of Carlile a series of imprisonments, was still far too strong in the fifties and sixties to permit of an avowed Republican and Atheist being regarded without horror by the middle and upper classes. The more famous Carlyle, with all his loud esteem for sincerity and louder repudiation of cant, never dreamt of saying a plain word against the monarchy any more than against the current religion, though his political theories were at all times as far asunder from current monarchism as from democracy. He even went out of his way to speak smoothly of a royalty which did nothing. For a generation to which Carlyle figured as outspoken and veridical, therefore, anything so practical as Republicanism was wildly revolutionary, and so Bradlaugh figured from the first to the average imagination as a violent politician.

Strictly speaking, he was in a sense more violent in his politics than in his anti-theology, because political strife is necessarily more a matter of attack on living persons than is the doctrinal strife between Atheism and Theism. As a republican he could not avoid discussing the personalities of the Hanoverian dynasty, inasmuch as the practical strength of royalism lies in the hereditary self-abasement of men before the hereditary royal person as such, not in any common hold on a monarchic theory of Government. To people who gloried in living under the Guelphs, an exposure of the Guelphs was the only relevant or intelligible answer. We may indeed say generally of monarchy what Strauss said of dogma, that the true criticism of it is its history. But the practical sanity which in Bradlaugh balanced the fieriest zeal, showed him from the first that Republicanism could only advance by way of culture and reason, never by way of violence. He "spoke" bullets and bayonets, but he never for an instant countenanced their use in English politics; and he had always a mixture of wrath and contempt for those who blustered of carrying by force, or threats of force, any reform in the Constitution. Even while he was delivering in lectures his "Impeachment of the House of Brunswick," he constantly declared that the mass of the people were not yet qualified to constitute a republican state; and he declared as much when, in 1873, he spoke at the banquet given by the then Republican leaders at Madrid in his honour as delegate from the Republican Conference which had just been held at Birmingham.

The almost entire subsidence of Republican agitation in England within the last twenty years, after the considerable show of Republican feeling which followed on the fall of the Empire in France, is an interesting and instructive fact, worth a little explanation here. It does not mean that the nation is less ready for a Republic; the fact is quite the other way. Recent tests have shown that in the average working-class Liberal and Radical Club, when the question is plainly raised, there is virtually no feeling in favour of the retention of Monarchy. The old devotion to the monarch as such has almost completely passed away among the more intelligent workers, and now subsists only among their weaker brethren, and in the middle and upper classes. Political movements, however, are made and marred not by pure reasoning but by special stresses of feeling, and there has been little or nothing in the annals of the past twenty years to set up a new stress of feeling against the monarchy in England, while there has been much that has tended to put the republican ideal in the background. It is hardly to the credit of the nation that it lays less store by a great principle or ideal than by concrete points of lower importance; but such is and must long be the fact. The movement which led to the Republican Conference in 1873, to begin with, suffered from the still vivid recollection of the horrors of the Commune. Next it was found that among its adherents were many who were less concerned to set up a British Republic than to further by that means the independence of Ireland. Thus the movement was in itself weakened by want of unity of motive and purpose, and could make little headway against the vast forces of habit and prejudice which buttress the Throne. Even what headway it did make was due largely to the then very common feeling of personal hostility to the Prince of Wales, whose reputed character offended many who would not of their own accord have been likely to raise the question of Monarchy versus Republic. Another ground for hostility to the Crown was and is the sufficiently solid one of its cost; but here again the spectacle of the financial corruption in leading Republics has tended to damp down anti-monarchic feeling. It is pretty clear that, barring any new and special cause for outcry against the Throne, its abolition in this country will only result from the slow accumulation of indifference and of educated aversion to the snobbery which cherishes and is cherished by it. This certainly cannot take place during the lifetime of the reigning sovereign, whose age and popularity alike go to silence serious agitation. It may or may not come about during the next generation.

Bradlaugh used to be quoted as saying that he intended that the heir apparent should never come to the Throne. He never said anything so idle, though in his youth he thought it possible that the Republic might be attained in his lifetime. As years went on, his insight into human nature led him to feel that agitation for an ideal form of Government was less directly fruitful than agitation against the abuses of class privilege; and in the last dozen years of his life, his political work went mainly to reforms within the lines of the Constitution. Apart from this partial change of tactic, his position underwent no change from first to last. His political doctrine may be broadly described as a demand for the fullest admission of the people to the rights of self-government, and further, the application of the powers thus acquired to the removal or reform of all laws framed in the interest of the upper few. This was the ideal he had formed for himself in his youth, and he declined to substitute for it the ideal of Socialism, which had begun to be vaguely popular towards the end of his life. The refusal rested on his experience, and on his character. In his youth he had seen a great impression made by the teaching and the achievement of Robert Owen, whose propaganda came so closely in relation with that of Secularism that in several towns the old halls of the Owenites have been till recent years, or are still, carried on by the surviving followers of Owen, as Secularist meeting-places. For Owen, whom he had met in youth, Bradlaugh had much esteem. "No Socialist myself," he wrote in later life, "I yet cannot but concede that [Owen's] movement had enormous value, if only as a protest against that terrible and inhuman competitive struggle, in which the strong were rewarded for their strength, and no mercy was shown to the weakest."[107] 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. He was in a general sense the successor of the Chartists; and in that connection it is impossible not to feel that if such a one as he had been in the place of Fergus O'Connor, the political advance of the past half century would have been considerably quickened. As it was, his labours have probably counted more than those of any other single man in his day to rouse the workers in the towns to vigorous political action. Before they had the vote, he not only helped to lead the agitation for their enfranchisement, but appealed to them directly on the issues which he wanted their suffrage to settle. It is the fashion of the new Socialism to represent that the old Radicalism wrought for political enfranchisement without any notion of what use the vote was to be turned to. Common sense and common candour will put that account of things aside without much trouble. Bradlaugh for one had very definite notions of what he wanted the vote to do. His programme was both positive and negative. He strongly supported the Radical demand for retrenchment of an expenditure which was always tending to benefit, not the many, but the few; and he detested the policy of "safe" foreign aggression which, after being long associated with the name of Palmerston, came to be identified with that of Beaconsfield. The fact that this policy had the support of some who later figured as Socialists, did not increase his esteem for their after-course. His sympathy with the small and weak nationalities whom England selected for attack was rooted in the intense sense of justice which inspired his whole life. After working for struggling Italy and Poland, he refused to stand by in silence while his own country unscrupulously made war on Afghans, on Zulus, and on Egyptians, on pretexts which all Englishmen would have execrated had they been put forward by Russians. And as he never made popularity his guiding principle, he as instantly and resolutely opposed the aggressions of Mr Gladstone's Government as those of the Tories. In none of the sins of modern Liberalism, whether in Africa or in Ireland, was he implicated. But he had a constructive as well as a limitary ideal, a home policy as well as a foreign; and whereas his course on the latter head will now be endorsed by most Liberals, his social doctrine is still in need of exposition and justification.

§ 2.

A notable fact in the history of popular Freethought in England has been its association with the social teaching of Malthus, which first came before the world only a few years after Paine's attack on orthodoxy. There is nothing to show that Paine ever realised what a blow was struck at his optimistic Theism, by the essay which his fellow-Theist Malthus wrote to rebut the optimist assumptions on the "Political Justice" of Godwin, a Freethinker who held by the revolutionary optimism in the sphere of politics, while tending away from Deistic optimism in philosophy. Paine, who was certainly as much bent on construction as on destruction, sketched a socio-political system which will be found by many readers as impressive to-day as it was found by Pitt. He proposed on the one hand a progressive income-tax, which should yield new revenue and break up large estates, and on the other hand a system of stipends to poor families; annuities to decayed tradesmen and others over fifty, increasing after sixty; provision for the education of the children of the poor; donations for births, marriages, and some funerals; and "employment at all times for the casual poor in the cities of London and Westminster." Save as regards the old age pensions, which represent a great improvement on pauper relief, and the education scheme, all of this plan comes under the destructive criticism of Malthus, inasmuch as it does not recognise the fatal tendency of an untaught population to multiply in excess of the economic possibilities of maintenance. The plan of allowancing poor families at so much per head would have quickened immensely the progress towards national bankruptcy which was carried so far under the old Poor Law. It would have bred paupers by the thousand.

The demonstration of Malthus naturally was not relished by the Radicals, to whom it was first addressed; and Godwin in particular met it with indecent acrimony, as did Coleridge, the Conservative. But the next generation of Freethinkers assimilated the argument, and a certain propaganda for the restriction of families was carried on by Richard Carlile. It is a remarkable fact that two Christian priests have laid two corner-stones of the structure of Atheistic polity for modern England. Butler in confuting the Deists wrought as much for Atheism as for orthodoxy; Malthus, in meeting the remaining Deists on the ground of sociology, confuted their optimism on the practical side. Freethought finally accepted both services, rectifying Malthus as it rectified Butler; and under Bradlaugh it made for science all round. Malthusianism in its original form certainly lent itself to Toryism; and no amount of benevolence on the part of Malthus could make his doctrine acceptable to democracy so long as it was tied down to his Christian ethic. The step which reconciled the knowledge of the law of population with energetic Radicalism in politics was taken when rationalists laid it down that the prudential check need not mean prolonged celibacy. Teaching as he did the all-importance of checking the birth-rate, and knowing as he did the possibility of bringing about the restraint, Bradlaugh had no further cause for misgiving as to political progress than his recognition of the general capacity of human nature to blunder.

He took up the neo-Malthusian position emphatically in his early pamphlet on "Jesus, Shelley, and Malthus," published in 1861, a somewhat youthfully rhetorical, but still a very notable presentment of the three main influences successively brought to bear on the problem of poverty—the spirit of religious submission, the spirit of humanitarian revolt, and the spirit of science. He pleaded for the last. "An acquaintance with political economy," he there declares, "is as necessary to the working man as is a knowledge of navigation to the master of a ship. It is the science of social life, the social science." And he was able in those days of the "orthodox" economics to cite in support of his definition, from the high priest of orthodoxy, a deliverance which may surprise readers whose knowledge of the old economics is not commensurate with their censure of it.

"The object of political economy," says Mr M'Culloch, "is to point out the means by which the industry of man may be rendered most productive of those necessaries, comforts, and enjoyments which constitute wealth; to ascertain the circumstances most favourable for its accumulation, the proportion in which it is divided among the different classes of the community, and the mode in which it may be most advantageously consumed."

And in another early pamphlet on "Poverty and its Effect on the Political Condition of the People," first published in 1863, he put as one of his mottoes, after a more guarded sentence from John Mill, this from Sir James Steuart:—

"The object of political economy is to secure the means of subsistence to all the inhabitants, to obviate every circumstance which might render this precarious, to provide everything necessary for supplying the wants of society, and to employ the inhabitants so as to make their several interests accord with their supplying each other's wants."

But his application of the principle was democratic and Neo-Malthusian, not Collectivist. "Unless," he wrote, "the necessity of the preventative or positive checks to population be perceived; unless it be clearly seen that they must operate in one form if not in another, and that, though individuals may escape them, the race cannot, human society is a hopeless and insoluble riddle." And for years before this he had persistently pressed the point in his lectures, steadily defying the odium which his action brought upon him. As early as 1862 we find him temperately replying to denunciation on this head in a lecture on "Malthusianism and its connection with Civil and Religious Liberty," of which a partial report happened to be taken in shorthand. "It may almost seem unwise," he remarked, "to be continually putting this subject before you; but really I find myself so misrepresented, and so liable to be misunderstood, in quarters where one would expect better things, that you must not wonder if I seek to make it clear to you why I persist in this advocacy." He here pressed the law of population as a fundamental datum of political science.

"I shall urge upon you this morning that there can be no permanent civil and religious liberty, no permanent and enduring freedom for humankind, no permanent and enduring equality amongst men and women, no permanent and enduring fraternity, until the subject which Malthus wrote upon is thoroughly examined, and until the working men make that of which Malthus was so able an exponent the science of their everyday life; until, in fact, they grapple with it, and understand that the poverty which they now have to contend against must always produce the present evils which oppress them."

Again:—

"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. Ignorance is the necessary sequence of their poverty. Are the people poor? For the poor there are no museums, no pictures, no elevating spheres of life, no grand music, no ennobling poetry. All these phases are closed to them; and why? Because their life is a constant struggle to live.... What is the use of preaching to the masses if the masses do not understand the language in which you talk to them? What is the use of your phrases to them when their education compels them not to comprehend the words you say, nay, makes them misunderstand you—for unfortunately poverty has its education, and is in this case worse than mere ignorance. There is a miseducation in poverty, which distorts the human mind, destroys self-reliant energy, and is a most effectual barrier in the way of religious liberty. Liberty, equality, fraternity, are words used very often about the Republican institutions of the world; but you can never have liberty, equality, and fraternity as long as there is poverty dividing one class from another."

These words have been echoed since by Socialists and others who represent Bradlaugh as a "Manchester" politician; and who either evade the question of the birth-rate, or deny that it is of any account. Their argument takes two main forms: (1) That to urge prudence on the poor is useless, since they will not listen; while the better workers who do listen are "sterilised;" (2) that there would be no over-population if only wealth were properly distributed. Both arguments are fallacious; the first proceeding upon ignorance of the facts, and the desire to shirk a troublesome question; the second upon non-comprehension of the law of population. In the first case, the objector first implies that it might be good to limit families if only people could be got to do so, and then proceeds to say that the limiting of families is harmful when practised. Both of these conflicting views are erroneous in fact. 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. A little money spent by the charitable in helping the very poor in this way would obviate the need for endless alms to relieve the misery which ignorant instinct multiplies. Nor is there the least need to fear the "sterilising" of the more prudent, as the limitation of the family has been unwarrantably termed. Small families do not necessarily mean lessened total population. A man who has only three children and rears them all healthfully, maintains the species more efficiently than a man who has eight, loses six, and perforce rears the two survivors badly, because what might have nourished two or three well was for years spent in merely keeping more alive. The extreme case of France, over which there has been so much superficial talk in France and elsewhere, is no such portent as it is made out, but is in part explicable by the stress of the influenza plague, which heavily affected even the English birth-rate, and is in part a useful reminder to French statesmen that they are pressing too heavily on their country's resources, and need to mend their methods. Withal, the misery in France is far less grinding and pervasive than the misery in England.

As to the argument that it is not over-breeding, but bad distribution that causes poverty, the answer is that both causes operate, but that over-breeding can work misery under any system of distribution whatever, and is a main support to bad distribution at present. Some Malthusians have supposed that with a proper proportionment of population to the resources of the time being, poverty would wholly disappear. This is over-sanguine; but the case of the United States in the first half of the century, when resources were still far ahead of labour supply, gives abundant support to a more moderate claim. On the other hand, unless the lesson of prudential restraint be learned, the most thorough socialistic system of distribution will simply incur the most complete ruin. People reason that if only the resources of the world were properly utilised, all could be fed and housed comfortably. That is quite true; but they forget that if there be no restraint, the population of the world, being better placed than ever, will double at least every twenty-five years, and will thus soon upset any possible system of housing and feeding, and reduce the general condition to toil and poverty all round. This is so obvious when put, that the optimists are fain to fall back on a theory that population slackens spontaneously under conditions of comfort. Mr George moves nimbly between this theory and one which absolutely negates it. But all such pleas resolve themselves into either an admission that the race must and will learn to practise prudential restraint, which is a surrender to Malthusianism, or an assumption of a pre-ordained beneficent harmony in Nature, the old optimism in a new dress, or rather an old dress "turned."

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; that these babes had much better not have been born; that their birth might have been prevented; and that the survivors suffered from their birth. That men can shut their eyes to these overwhelming facts, and go on arguing, on an "if," that there is no need to restrain the birth-rate "in the meantime," is one of the darkest anomalies of political science.

Between the obstinacy of the opposing fallacy and the brutality of the resistance of prejudice, many men who recognise the truth have yet been wearied into holding their peace, in a pessimistic conviction that mankind in the mass cannot be enlightened on the matter. Of that attitude Bradlaugh was to the last incapable, though he had more cause than most men to know how tremendous were the odds in the struggle. Later generations will find it hard to credit the facts. A policy which on the face of the case could only be motived by public spirit and zeal for the truth was met by the vilest aspersions, the most malignant imputation of the most preposterously bad intentions. Personal vice was freely charged in explanation of an action which no vicious man would have had the self-denial to undertake. It is the bare truth to say that for many years a main part of the work of the Christian Evidence Society in England has been to employ hirelings to charge Secularism with the promotion of sexual vice—this on the strength partly of Bradlaugh's work for Neo-Malthusianism, and partly of the vogue of the anonymous work entitled "The Elements of Social Science," in which the arguments for family limitation are combined with a perfectly well-intentioned argument for sexual freedom as against celibacy and prostitution, the evils of which are not only exposed, but provided against in the book by careful medical instruction. Of this book, as we have seen, while honouring the moral courage and absolute benevolence of the anonymous writer, Bradlaugh expressly disclaimed the more advanced doctrines; but he has been saddled with them all the same, as if his burden of unpopularity were not already heavy enough.

He had fit though few compensations. He lived to see the rightness of his course more and more widely and openly admitted; and to see some Freethinkers and others who had unworthily attacked him for it come round and follow in his steps. And at his trial with Mrs Besant for selling the Knowlton pamphlet in 1877 he was able to tell the jury of higher sanctions than these. Mill in his "Autobiography," telling how he was attacked for subscribing to Bradlaugh's election fund in 1868, says of him:—

"He had the support of the working-classes; having heard him speak, I knew him to be a man of ability, and he had proved that he was the reverse of a demagogue, by placing himself in strong opposition to the prevailing opinion of the democratic party on two such important subjects as Malthusianism and Personal Representation. Men of this sort, who, while sharing the democratic feelings of the working classes, judged political questions for themselves, and had courage to assert their individual convictions against popular opposition, were needed, as it seemed to me, in Parliament."

It may here be added that Grote, who was a regular reader of the National Reformer and a Neo-Malthusian also, approved even more strongly. The further fact, now established, that Mill was in his youth actually prosecuted for distributing Neo-Malthusian literature, should serve to check the malice of those persons, clerical and other, who still divide Freethinkers into two classes—one of "irreproachable morals," following Mill, the other of "loose and dissolute character," following Bradlaugh.

Some Neo-Malthusians have been charged, despite their rejection of the non-possumus of Malthus, with excluding all other reforms in their advocacy of family limitation. If this charge was even valid, it certainly was not against Bradlaugh. He might much more reasonably be criticised for not keeping the population question to the front in every discussion of main reforms than for unduly obtruding it, or using it to discourage reforms made in disregard of it. After he had thoroughly forced it on the public attention, he trusted more to the quiet dissemination of educative literature on the subject, and the enlistment of individual self-interest in the reform, than to the political handling of it on the platform, where the insistence on it seems still to arouse the resentment of many Socialists and others, who can see no need for any reform save those they themselves propose, and are particularly wroth at the suggestion that working men can be in any degree accountable for their own troubles. The defence of the Knowlton pamphlet, as has been shown in the foregoing pages, was forced on Bradlaugh; and it was the more trying for him in that he was always personally averse to the detailed discussion of sexual topics. At the same time, it was impossible for him to submit to the stupid suppression by the authorities of the only cheap literature that gave to the poor the necessary knowledge for the limitation of their families. He was bound to resist that by every principle he professed; by his doctrine of freedom for the press and his doctrine of prudence in the family. So resisting, he identified himself once for all with the Neo-Malthusian doctrine in politics, though the resulting special notoriety of the topic was thus the work of the prosecutors themselves, who probably did more by their hostile act for the spread of popular knowledge than Bradlaugh had before been able to do by his years of advocacy.

How important was his introduction of the principle into politics can only be realised by those who know how much the principle means; and it is still in the stage of being vilified by the pious and contemned by the superficial, in which latter class may be included a good many Socialists. The former heap upon avowed Neo-Malthusians an abuse which they withhold from eminent politicians who confess opinions that imply Neo-Malthusianism or nothing. Mr John Morley, for instance, has expressed his regret that "we,"—that is, the Liberal party in general—shirk the population question so much; and Mr Leonard Courtney has laid it down that we may as well build a house in disregard of the law of gravitation as hope to make a community prosper without regard to the law of population. The late Lord Derby spoke to similar effect. Either, then, such politicians mean to urge, with Malthus, that working-men shall postpone marriage until they have saved a good deal of money—that is, till middle or late life—or they approve of early marriage with conjugal prudence. That is the whole matter; for the nature of the prudence is a quite subsidiary question, on which no wise man or doctor will narrowly dogmatise. But nobody, not even the Times, denounces or insults Mr Courtney or Mr Morley or the late Lord Derby for saying what each of them has said. As usual, the man who says explicitly what other men say implicitly is singled out for attack, not on the score of taste, but on the score of the plain doctrine, however put.

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 prosecution[108] 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 fined[109] 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.

That Bradlaugh was no pedantic individualist is shown, not only by his Truck Act, but by his agitation for a Labour Bureau, which was the origin of that institution, though the official Liberal press usually gives all the credit to Mr Mundella, who merely acted on Bradlaugh's urging. And while the latter held that the action of the trade unions was in some cases mistaken, he never ceased to urge their attention to political affairs all round.

"Many of the great trades organisations and friendly societies," he wrote in 1889, "have until recently prided themselves on being non-political. Some of the trades societies and nearly all the friendly societies still so pride themselves. This has been a serious blunder, especially in a country where much legislation has been the work of a very limited class for the conservation of their own privileges."[117]

His limitary principle was one of sound common-sense, whether or not he recognised the full force of the economic indictment of competitive individualism.

"A good working doctrine for legislatures should be to mould conduct rather by the development of sound public opinion than by the operation of penal laws. Especially should the legislature be careful not to profess to do that for the worker, which it is reasonably possible for him to do for himself without the aid of the law. A duty enforced by others is seldom so well performed as a duty affirmed by the doer."

And these principles, which perhaps serve even some professed Liberals mainly as a ground for doing nothing, were with him a ground for insisting on an act of justice and expediency which such Liberals have been very loth to accede to. Bradlaugh's action in the great test case of recent English politics is a decisive proof of his foresight.

§ 5.

As the story of his life has shown, Bradlaugh had had special opportunities of studying the Irish question from the inside; and from the day when his young blood boiled at the murderous cruelty of an Irish eviction, he steadfastly supported the cause of the misruled Irish people. He never ceased to love England with that touch of pride and faith which is the whole stock-in-trade of the average patriot; but, combining it as he did with an intense sense of justice, he could never let that devotion blind him to the wrongs of other peoples at England's hands. And in the first years of his political activity, when he was pleading for rebel Poles and rebel Italians, he seems to have so far recognised the right of Irishmen to use force against the force of England, that he assisted the Fenian conspirators of 1867 to draw up their Republican proclamation, so revising it as to exclude every expression of race hatred and every appeal to religious feeling; "the complete separation of Church and State" being one of its stipulations. The full details of that connection will probably never now be known; but what is quite clear is that Bradlaugh was not only then opposed to the idea of an Irish Republic, but soon ceased to have the least faith in the possibility of a successful or even a well-planned Irish rising; while his invariable opposition to useless violence was emphatic in the case of the Clerkenwell and other outrages. All the more earnestly did he continue his propaganda for Irish reform. Holding as he did that the land question was fundamental in English politics, he could not but see that it was the very heart of the Irish trouble; and to the agitation for Irish land law reform he gave energetic support. But he was always far ahead of the slow movement of average English opinion; and while English Liberals were hoping that the concessions carried out by Gladstone would make Ireland a contented partner in the Union, Bradlaugh had already given his assent to the claim for Home Rule; always, however, flatly opposing the doctrine of separation. On this he was explicit when, speaking in New York in 1873, he found otherwise friendly Irish auditors disposed to be satisfied with nothing short of absolute severance from England. Home Rule, however, he all along considered to be not only just but inevitable. While those of us who hoped for a real Union (with Irishmen admitted to perfect equality in the Executive system) were urging that as a solution which escaped the proved dangers of Federalism, he had made up his mind that Englishmen could not and would not ever deal with Ireland as an integral part of the State; and he had declared himself a Home Ruler long before Mr Gladstone, who had frustrated the hope for a true Union by consistently keeping Irishmen out of his cabinets. That, helping as he thus did the Home Rule movement, he should yet have been treated with bigoted hostility and injustice by the bulk of the Irish Nationalists in his Parliamentary struggle, was so remarkable that explanations were demanded; and the Nationalists offered several, to the effect that Bradlaugh had turned against them. It is necessary to go into some detail to show that this is untrue.

At the outset of his Parliamentary struggle Bradlaugh was not only not regarded as an opponent by the Nationalists as a political party, but was even defended by Parnell, although against the wish of most of that leader's Catholic followers; and despite the quickly shown ill-will of these, Bradlaugh continued to support their cause in the House during the nine months of his conditional tenure of his seat, 1880-81. But as he never hesitated to counter what he held to be wrong policy among English democrats, so he condemned, albeit reluctantly, what he held to be unjustifiable courses on the part of the Parnellites. This appears in his "Parliamentary Jottings" in his journal under date 5th September 1880, where he says he "much regretted, during the long conflict of Thursday-Friday, to find himself brought into collision with the Irish members." Nineteen Irish members had spoken, with his entire sympathy, against the Constabulary Vote; and after midnight they sought to postpone the discussion, on the ground that "more Irish members wished to speak," though not a penny of the estimates had been voted. There were only twelve more Home Rulers present, and they could all have spoken had they wished. They, however, appealed to the Radicals to help them to delay business, on the score that the Constabulary Vote was a "life and death question." As obstruction could only delay and not stop the vote, Bradlaugh objected, and made a speech to that effect, which was warmly cheered by the Liberals, and as warmly condemned by Home Rulers; though, when it came to voting, only 27 of the 61 Home Rulers went into the lobby. Obstruction he always condemned. This was a pretext for Irish hostility, though there had been abundance of that already. Some weeks later he writes:—

"My personal position as to Ireland is by no means an easy one. I find English Radicals in general, and myself in particular the subject of constant abuse in Irish journals. I read words attributed to Irish members of the House of Commons full of the most intense hostility to everything English, and find speakers in their presence declaring that the land movement is only the cover for the disruption of the two countries."

And after quoting some of the frenzied sayings of Irish Americans, he appeals to "Mr Parnell and his co-traversers," and other responsible Nationalists, "not to check our desire to co-operate with them by their open declarations of hostility to our race;" and "in the name of humanity ... to check the tendency of the people whom they lead to waste their energies in worse than useless force." At the same time, he protested against the prosecution of Mr Parnell and his colleagues by the Liberal Government, supported the fund for their defence, and incurred new hostility in England in consequence. Correspondents wrote him on both sides, and he answered:[118]—

"We must ask both sides to be a little patient. The agrarian crimes cannot be justified, nor does our contributing to the Parnell Defence justify these. We subscribe in order that he and others may have fair play: it is never easy to be defendant in a State trial.... Some remind us that three-fourths of the Irish M.P.'s voted against us, and nearly every Irish paper attacks us. That is so, but it does not alter our duty. Our duty is to work honestly for redress of Irish grievances, although even every Irishman should be personally unjust to us."

One form of the injustice is seen in an editorial sentence from the Dublin Freeman about the same time, àpropos of the argument of the Tory St James's Gazette[119] to the effect that over-population was the cause of Irish distress. "Does the St James's propose," asked the Freeman, "the introduction of Bradlaughism into Ireland, when it says that the 'rapid growth of population, which is checked in some countries,' must be fatal to the prosperity of cotter families across the Channel?" 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. Not a word of support did Bradlaugh ever get from a Tory organ in his attempt to avert the evil of over-population. But as regards Ireland, he not only recognised that over-population there was positively fostered by the unjust land system, but he again and again in the House denied that even wholesale emigration, if practicable, would cure the evil while that system endured. In July 1880 he writes:—

"I had to listen to the Hon. B. Fitzpatrick, sent by 118 votes for the borough of Portarlington, who, in the course of a wild display of imbecility, had the audacity to declare that wholesale emigration of the natives of Ireland was the 'only remedy' for Irish distress; and this was said by an Irishman."

On the 15th of the same month, in the debate on the second reading of the Irish Tenants' Compensation Bill, he protested against the irrelevance of the Tory opposition to the Bill.

"There had been renewed the argument that Ireland was over-populated, and that the tenants who were distressed ought to find in some other country the relief they could not find in Ireland. Now, there was no colony in England, and there was no part of the United States of America, to which any poor man without means could go, hoping to benefit himself at the present time. Therefore, those who recommended emigration had either never taken the trouble to investigate the matter, or were simply talking against time to delay the measure going into committee."

Again, though in January 1881 he found himself "driven into the lobby, for the first time this Session, against the Irish members, only to vote that the business of the House was not to be absolutely stopped by an utterly irregular discussion," he took a most active part in opposing the Government's coercive measures. In the debate on the address he "made one of eight English Radicals who alone had been found to record their votes in favour of Mr Parnell's amendment," though feeling that the Irish methods of hindering business had kept many English members out of the Nationalist lobby; and when Mr Forster made his appeal for special powers, Bradlaugh made a strong speech in support of one of the Irish amendments.[120] Yet again he felt bound to vote for the suspension of Mr Biggar, doing it "with very heavy heart," and grieving "that Irish members should so play into the hands of their enemies, and so totally damage the cause of their country." Of the later suspensions of Mr Dillon and the O'Gorman Mahon, he wrote with much regret; but for others who had, outside, "boasted that they wished to degrade Parliament," he confessed he had "little pity." None the less, he moved the rejection of the Coercion Bill on the second reading, in the never-explained absence of Mr Parnell, who had suddenly gone to Paris. The Irish Anti-Coercion Committee, who had just denounced him in one of their leaflets for his votes against obstruction, felt constrained about this stage to send him a vote of thanks. All the while, his journal had published numerous articles sharply attacking the Government's coercion policy.

A vote on the Arms Bill was the last act by which Bradlaugh ministered to the wish of the Nationalists to have a case against him. He had repeatedly protested against the advice given by Mr Dillon and others to Irish peasants to buy rifles; and he held that the case of Ireland was bad enough without adding to wrong and misery the freedom to seek amends in murder. His vote on this point, like his votes against obstruction, were held by the Parnellites to outweigh all his protests against coercion and all his appeals for land law reform; his exclusion from Parliament after the decision in the Law Courts in the spring of 1881 was hailed by most of them with delight; and during his long battle outside, they were among his worst enemies, the Irish press and people fully abetting them. Still he never relaxed his advocacy of the cause of the Irish peasantry, pleading for a merciful and conciliatory treatment of them when they were hooting his name; and when he at length obtained his seat in 1886 he gave his unhesitating support to the Home Rule policy of Mr Gladstone. It was in that year that a leading Irish Nationalist went up to him in the House with the greeting, "Mr Bradlaugh, you have been the best Christian of us all." Considering that only the influence of the Catholic priesthood could account for the course taken by the Parnellite party, the acknowledgment—in spirit if not in form—was suggestive of some moral progress on the Christian side.

It may be questioned whether many Liberals could have thus borne the test undergone by Bradlaugh on the Irish question. It is certain that Bright, with all his chivalry and rectitude, was somewhat influenced in his latter attitude on that question by the evil return which Irishmen had made to him for all his efforts on their behalf. Bradlaugh suffered far worse treatment at their hands, but was in no way turned by it from his conviction of what was just. He was content to recognise that the people were swayed by the priests, and that in any case it is vain to look for the moral fruits of equality from a people to whom equality has been for ages denied. He had been treated by Irish Nationalists as he had been by English Conservatives; and though he felt the ingratitude of the former, he would not admit that they had shown any grosser unscrupulousness than the latter, who had denied justice to an Englishman on motives of party strategy, reinforced by religious malice. If there was any difference, it was that the Irishmen had been more moved by religious malice and less by party strategy; and it is usual to rate the latter motive the lower of the two.

Bradlaugh himself would never have claimed that he had shown any special magnanimity in the case; but those who know how much personal interest or pique counts for in political action will recognise the singularity of his course. It belonged to his character, equally with his avowal and advocacy of unpopular opinions. Later, when the question of Woman Suffrage was being pressed on his constituency, he was told by Mr Labouchere, as he had been told by others before, that if the women of Northampton had a vote he would not be returned. His public answer was:—

"If I knew this to be true, it would not hinder me from casting my vote in favour of woman suffrage, even if my vote alone should be required to pass the Bill. I deeply value the representation of Northampton, but the grant of the right of woman to the suffrage cannot be determined by the fact that, if legalised, her exercise of that right according to her conscience would be personally hostile to myself."

It may be doubted whether Mr Labouchere gauged the situation aright. When Bradlaugh stood for Northampton in 1868 and was beaten, the wives and women-folk of his supporters subscribed their scanty pence, and bought him a gold pencil-case. If after hearing the utterance above cited the Northampton women of to-day were capable of voting in the mass against a man so declaring himself, they would indeed give Mr Labouchere a better case against their enfranchisement than he has yet been able to make out. But would they?

§ 6.

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. Again and again Bradlaugh protested, as other Englishmen had protested before him, against the inveterate apathy with which the House of Commons regards Indian questions, as shown by the scanty handful of members who attend to hear them discussed once a year. The death of Professor Fawcett, "the member for India," left Indian interests ill cared for indeed, and immediately on gaining his seat Bradlaugh stepped into the vacant place, although it was by itself work enough for one man, and he had three men's work on hand besides.

His speech on India in 1883 to his constituents shows the broad and systematic way in which he approached the problem. He studied it with the minute care he bestowed on every subject he handled; and in a few years he acquired by his work an amount of popularity among natives such as had never before been earned by an Englishman outside India, and by few Anglo-Indians. As this work was mostly done after his Parliamentary struggle was over, the record of it belongs to the story of his closing years; but it was only the consistent sequel to his previous political life. He took up the cause of India as he had done those of Italy, Poland, Ireland, of Boers, Zulus, and Egyptians, with no thought or prospect of personal gain, out of sheer zeal for justice and hatred of oppression. And inasmuch as Anglo-Indians of the school of Mr Rudyard Kipling have consistently derided and denounced his Indian policy, it may be fitting to note at this point the advantage that policy has over such opposition in respect of its relation to universal political principles. The doctrine of Mr Kipling's school—who may be defined as barbaric sentimentalists—is that Asia in general, and India in particular, are absolute exceptions to all the principles of European politics. The East, they say, is unprogressive, unchangeable, unimprovable. 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 extremely unfortunate that many Englishmen are ready to accept as final the sweeping sociological dicta of Mr Kipling, on the score merely of his first-hand knowledge of Indian life and his literary genius. Foolish generalisations on social possibilities have been made in every country in every age by men with first-hand knowledge of their theme; and it must be regretfully said that foolish men of genius are among the most eminent darkeners of counsel on such matters. When Mr Kipling gives a particular account of a particular phase of Indian life, Englishmen who in the terms of the case have no knowledge of that life accept the account as a "revelation," when obviously their estimate of it in that light has no critical value whatever. Strong in the suffrages of such judges, Mr Kipling has been pleased to speak of Bradlaugh as being prepared by defective education to take that mistaken view of Indian life which Mr Kipling inexpensively imputes to all inquiring Englishmen at home. The sufficient answer to that criticism is that there are many kinds of defective education, and that nobody can well be further wrong about India than Mr Kipling, inasmuch as he has himself contradicted every one of his own numerous generalisations by others. He first came forward with pictures of the Indian Civil and Military Services, in which they appeared nearly as corrupt as those of Russia are said to be: husbands getting promotion on the score of their wives' adultery, and so forth. Later he saw fit to represent the Indian Civil Service as embodying every virtue a Civil Service can have. As a rule, he pictures the English in India as the "Dominant Race," with impressive capitals, and the natives as being universally cowards. When, however, a native officer can "play like a lambent flame" on the polo-field, and can transgress every law of hospitality by thrasonically declaring defiance to Russia in the person of a Russian officer at a British mess-table, that native becomes even as an Englishman in Mr Kipling's eyes. The simple canon of Mr Kipling is the feeling that any race which thwarts his own must be base. Thus every indiscreet Russian officer must needs be a blackguard, and every disaffected Irishman a ruffian and a sneak; the evil principle being so deep rooted that the Asiatic children of an Irishman spontaneously take to cutting off cows' tails; though at the same time the Irish soldier is a hero of heroes, if only he is duly devoted to "the Queen, God bless her." It will be a bad business for English rule in India when minds which sociologise in this fashion come to be the guides of the British people in their political relations with their dependency.

Bradlaugh, it may suffice to say, was under no delusions as to the present political capacity of the Indian races. He perfectly recognised their bias to rhetoric and their immaturity of character, as well as the enormous difficulties in the way of their political amalgamation. Hence his programme for them was an extremely gradual introduction of the principle of self-rule. Nothing could be more judicious and restrained than his brief address to the Congress on his brief visit to India after his dangerous illness of 1889, within about a year of his death. And the chances are that before a generation is over his view of the case will be the accepted commonplace of Liberal politics; while the notion of a perpetual domination of Englishmen in a country where they cannot rear healthy children will be regarded as a crowning flight of unscientific political sentiment. In any case, it implies no great rashness to predict that an England which ignores the affairs of its subjects as much as possible in Parliament will not long be able to maintain a despotic rule over a people accessible to Western ideas. The Home Rule principle, which was for Bradlaugh a principle of universal virtue, however different the degree of its application to a given case at a given moment, must in time be wrought out in India as elsewhere, if only it goes forward in the West, and the West keeps up its growing intercourse with the East. And it was one of his many political merits to have been one of the first to see this not only abstractly but in the concrete.

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Enough has now been said to convey a broad idea of the manner and matter of Bradlaugh's philosophy of life, cosmical and political, as it was developed and acted on by him at the time of his most memorable appearance on the arena of British public life. At that time much work, though not many years of life, remained to him, so that some who then opposed him claimed afterwards that they could not have known his capacities for good, as exhibited in his extraordinary Parliamentary labours. But the foregoing account of his teaching and action will probably suffice to show that his political career was all of a piece, and that at the time of his ostracism he had given proof of all the powers and opinions which were later admitted to do him honour. Neither, as we shall see, did he in later life surrender any one of the teachings of his earlier years. He laid more stress on some and less on others; but he unsaid nothing, and for the most part he did but carry on his youthful programme. Before 1880 he had been the ardent and yet sagacious friend of oppressed nationalities, the advocate of Radical land law reform, the defender of liberty of conscience, the exponent of the claims of the poor against the rich, the preacher of unpopular but all-important doctrines on personal conduct. In the brief period of his first tenure of his seat he wrought vigorously against the abuse of Perpetual Pensions, which he was later the means of removing, though not in a fashion fully satisfying to himself. In the same period he exhibited a constant concern for the remedying of all manner of grievances. As early as 1863, too, he had taken what Mill rightly calls the extremely undemagoguelike line of publishing a pamphlet in favour of Proportional Representation, on the lines of Hare's scheme—a "counsel of perfection" still too high for most democrats.

As for his general tone of feeling on the questions which turn in an equal degree on feeling and judgment, it is well illustrated by the last non-personal speech he made in the House in the period of his conditional tenure of his seat. It was delivered on 28th March, and was on the subject of flogging in the army:—

"Mr Bradlaugh said he wished to say a few words on this matter from a different point of view than other members who had spoken. He had been a private in the army during the time that flogging was permitted for offences now described as trivial, and he heard the same argument used, that it would cause a relaxation of discipline if flogging were abolished. If hon. members opposite knew the feeling of the soldiers at that time it would have much modified some of the speeches delivered to-day (hear, hear); and the hon. member for Sunderland (Sir H. Havelock-Allan) would be surprised to hear the number of letters he had received from private soldiers, asking him to speak on this subject to-day. There was a feeling of utter detestation against the punishment, not simply on the part of the men who were likely to suffer from it, but on the part of every one else. Private soldiers in England occupied a position which no other private soldier in the whole of Europe occupied, and he did not know any other country in the whole world where it was a disgrace to wear the uniform of your country. He remembered upon one occasion he went into an hotel in a great city and ordered a cup of coffee, and was told that he could not be served because he wore the uniform of his country. All punishments which made soldiers seem less reputable than their fellow-citizens ought to be abolished. He asked the Government to allow nothing whatever to influence them in favour of this most degrading punishment. The men who once felt the lash were not loyal to any command, and they felt a bitterness and an abhorrence of every one connected with the ordering of the punishment. If they flogged a man engaged on active service, he was either a good man or a bad man, a man of some spirit or none at all. If he were a man of any spirit, there were weapons in his hands, and he might use them for purposes of revenge. The hon. and gallant member for Wigton Burghs talked of men who preferred the lash. The army would be far better without such men. (Mr Childers: Hear, hear.) He had seen the lash applied, the man tied up, and stripped in the sight of his comrades; he had seen the body blacken and the skin break; he had heard the dull thud of the lash as it fell on the blood-soddened flesh, and he was glad of having the opportunity of making his voice heard against it to-day, and trusted that nothing would induce the Government to retain under any conditions such a brutal punishment. (Cheers.)"

And it was with these matters in their knowledge that a majority of the House of Commons subjected him for five years to an extremity of wanton injustice of which it is still difficult to think without burning anger. The story of that injustice must now be separately told.

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