To repeat to you words signed, in September, 1656, by your own ancestor, Sir John Northcote, M.P. for the County of Devon: “we who have been duly chosen to be members of the Parliament, have an undoubted right to meet, sit, and vote in Parliament,” and “no part of the representative body are trusted to consent to anything in the nation’s behalf if the whole have not their free liberty of debating and voting in the matters propounded.” To continue the language of your sturdy ancestor, you have “now declared that the people’s choice cannot give a man a right to sit in Parliament, but the right must be derived from your gracious will and pleasure.” You reply that you have the force on your side; but Sir John Northcote declared that: “The violent exclusion of any of the people’s deputies from doing their duties and executing their trust freely in Parliament doth change the state of the people from freedom into a mere slavery;” and if you tell me that the majority of the present members of the House are with you in what you do, I recall Sir John Northcote’s protest: “That all such chosen members for Parliament as shall take upon them to approve of the forcible exclusion of other chosen members, or shall sit, vote, and act by the name of the Parliament of England while, to their knowledge, any of the chosen members are so by force shut out, we say such ought to be reputed betrayers of the liberties of England.”
You cannot now pretend with any hope that sane men will believe you, that you desire “to prevent the profanation of the oath.” In 1880 you prevented the second reading of the Affirmation Bill, introduced by my colleague, Mr. Labouchere, under the pretext that such a measure ought to be introduced by the Government. In 1881, after you yourself had said the matter should be dealt with by legislation, you prevented the Government from introducing it. In 1882 your friends blocked the Affirmation measure again proposed by my colleague, and in 1883 you exerted every influence to defeat, and successfully defeated, the Affirmation Bill brought forward by the Government.
If you had really believed the oath profaned by me, you would have been one of the first to aid in removing the possible profanation by substituting the right of affirmation. In Ulster you took credit for keeping an Atheist out of Parliament, but it was not my Atheism you kept out, for I actually sat with you day by day, speaking, voting, and serving, from the beginning of July, 1880, until the end of March, 1881. And, during the whole of that time, my care was to be at least as good and loyal a member of that House as any sitting within its walls. I do not plead my conduct there, whilst using all my right, as anything on my behalf, for I at most could do no more than my duty; but at least I have the right to say that it was never suggested that I was other than a good working member of the House, strict in my attendance at and during every one of its sittings. It cannot be pretended that I used my right of speech to force upon the House one word which did not relate to the business then being dealt with, or that in any fashion I obtruded upon what should be a purely political assembly any views of mine on matters of religion.
You have permitted in public my conduct to be misstated in your presence, and utterances in Parliament to be attributed to me which are none of mine, and you have done this because you hoped that, by exciting religious and social prejudice against me, you might weaken the Government, and crawl back into office. To injure the Liberal party, you have allowed words which you pretend are sacred to be used as party cries, and you have made hundreds of thousands examine into and declare in favor of my opinions and expressions on religious questions who but for you might perhaps have never even known my name. You have allied yourself at Westminster with men whom you denounced in Ireland as “traitors and disloyal,” in order that, with their help, you might insult an English constituency; and you have succeeded in bringing Parliamentary Government into contempt by parading the House of Commons as the chief law-breaking assembly in the world. In four years against me you have done your worst to destroy me; with your own purse you have helped the various projects to ruin me; and you have so failed that clergymen and Nonconformist ministers have been driven to support me from very indignation against the injury you have done to the cause of religion. Your Conservative associations have flooded the country with leaflets containing garbled and misleading extracts from my speeches and writings, and have thus excited the curiosity of many whom I could have never reached. These, procuring my works, and finding that my words have been distorted and taken out of context, give a favor to me that I should perhaps have never otherwise won.
Few believe that you are moved by religious motives. Mr. Newdegate is regarded as sincere, though his sanity is doubted; but when men recollect the past and even present lives of many of those around you, whose tongues so loudly declare their piety, they come, not unnaturally, to the conclusion that he is the worst infidel who trails the banner of his church in the mire of political warfare, and permits the votes of the drunken, the dissolute, the dishonest, and the disloyal to be canvassed by his whips so that they may be counted on the side which he parades as that of the pure and the holy.
On the 7th February, 1882, I told you and your majority: “If I am not fit for my constituents, they shall dismiss me, but you never shall.” I have gone since voluntarily to my constituents—to those from whom you presented a petition with 10,400 mock signatures upon it. The answer has come at the ballot-box. My constituents bid me resist you, and I will. They trust me to defeat you, and I will. The law is on my side, and you fear its pronouncement. You kept me from the possibility of obtaining a decision as long as you could, but on the 11th February I broke through your barriers. Then you fruitlessly tried to erase all trace of my voting, and when you found that I beat you on this by adding a new vote as you rubbed out the vote before, then, in malicious spite, you shut me out of the tea-room, dining-room, cloak-room, and library. For shame, Sir Stafford Northcote! This was worthy of “O’Donnell,” but not of the leader of a great party. You wear knightly orders. You should be above a knave’s spitefulness.
My turn is coming. You have won sympathy for me throughout the land; you have made Northampton men stand by me closer than ever; you are now awaking the country to stand by Northampton. Mr. Justice Stephen says that the appeal is to the constituencies, and I appeal. In the name of justice, by the hope of liberty, in memory of English struggles for freedom, I appeal, and I hear the answer growing as you shall hear it, too, on the day when, from my place in the House, I move: “That all the resolutions respecting Charles Bradlaugh, member for Northampton, hindering him from obeying the law, and punishing him for having obeyed the law, be expunged from the Journals of this House as being subversive of the rights of the whole body of electors of this kingdom.”
Charles Bradlaugh.
30, St. James’ Place, S.W.