That peculiar English custom of women drinking at public bars helped along the work of undoing. It is a sorry tale, save for the devotion of the two girls and their brother for their father and his love for them. The mother was only a mother in name. She became a confirmed and helpless victim of alcoholism, and lingered on for some years, existing in a sanitarium or cared for by a special attendant.
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After his marriage Bradlaugh entered a lawyer's office. He soon became head clerk to the firm. His natural ability for public speaking made him a good trial advocate, and then he had a physical ability that rendered him especially valuable where seizures were to be made or evictions effected.
The practise of law then, it seems, was not at a very high mark. Wise men nowadays try to keep out of court. They know that in a lawsuit both sides lose, also that a bad compromise is better than a good lawsuit. But forty years ago, to "have the law on him" was quite the common way of dealing with your enemy, instead of forgetting the wrong that had been done you, and leaving the man to Nemesis.
We hear of a certain case where one of Bradlaugh's clients had built a brick house on rented ground, without the legal precaution of taking a ninety-nine-year lease. Naturally, the rapacious landlord—for all landlords are rapacious, I am told—ordered the renter out at the end of the year.
The renter then demanded that the landlord should pay him for his building. This was very foolish on the part of the renter, and revealed a woeful ignorance of common law. Bradlaugh was retained and interviewed the obdurate landlord—for all landlords, I am told, are obdurate as well as rapacious. But all was in vain.
That night Bradlaugh and his client got together a hundred good men and true and carried the house away from chimney to cornerstone, leaving nothing but the cellar.
This legal move was very much like that of Robert Ingersoll, who had a railroad company lay half a mile of track through one of the streets of Peoria, between midnight and sun-up, and then let the opposing party carry the case to the courts.
Ingersoll's interest in the world of thought cost him the Governorship of the State of Illinois. Bradlaugh's interest along similar lines cost him the foremost position at the English bar. The man had presence, persistence, courage, and that rapid, ready intellect which commands respect with judge, jury and opposition. Before he was twenty-five he knew history, mythology, poetry, economics and theology in a way that few men do who spend a lifetime in research.
Public speaking opens up the mental pores as no other form of intellectual exercise does. It inspires, stimulates, and calls out the reserves. Perhaps the best result of oratory is in that it reveals a man's ignorance to himself and shows him how little he knows, thus urging him to reinforce his stores and prepare for a siege.