"July 22, 1874.
"My dear Sir,—I ought long ago to have thanked you for sending me copies of your pamphlets on John Stuart Mill and the Rochdale Pioneers—and with so kind and partial a recognition of my co-operation with you in your great cause.
"That on Mill was due certainly to a just estimate of him, but how sad that human jackals should make it necessary. That on Co-operation I read and read again, welcoming the light you throw on it, for it is one of my most hopeful stepping-stones to a higher future. Thank you for the lesson—it cleared one or two dark places—not the first by any means—for I've read everything of yours I could lay my hands on. There was one small volume on Rhetoric—'Public Speaking and Debate,' methods of address, hints towards effective speech, etc.—which I studied faithfully, until some one to whom I had praised and lent it, acting probably on something like Coleridge's rule, that books belong to those who most need them—never returned me my well-thumbed essay, to my keen regret. Probably you never knew that we had printed your book. This was an American reprint—wholly exhausted—proof that it did good service. We reprinted, some ten years ago, one of your wisest tracts, the 'Difficulties that obstruct Co-operation.' It did us yeoman service. But enough, I shall beg you to accept a volume of old speeches printed long ago, because it includes my only attempt to criticise you—which you probably never saw. In it I will put, when I mail it, the last and best photograph of Sumner, and if you'll exchange, I'll add one of
"Yours faithfully, and ever,
"Wendell Phillips.
"Mr. G.J. Holyoake."
With Mr. Charles Bradlaugh I had personal relations all his life. I took the chair for him at the first public lecture he delivered. I gave him ready applause and support. At the time of what was called his "Parliamentary struggle," I was entirely with him and ready to help him. It was with great reluctance and only in defence of principle, to which I had long been committed, that I appeared as opposed to him. He claimed to represent Free Thought, with which I had been identified long before his day. My conviction was that a Free Thinker should have as much courage, consistency, and self-respect as any Apostle, or Jew, or Catholic, or Quaker. All had in turn refused to make a profession of opinion they did not hold, at the peril of death, or, as in the case of O'Connell and the Jews, at the certainty of exclusion from Parliament. They had only to take an oath, to the terms of which they could not honestly subscribe. Mr. Bradlaugh had no scruple about doing this. In the House of Commons he openly kissed the Bible, in which he did not believe—a token of reverence he did not feel. He even administered to himself the oath, which was contrary to his professed convictions. This seemed to be a reflection upon the honour of Free Thought. Had I not dissented from it, I should have been a sharer in the scandal, and Free Thought—so far as I represented it—would have been regarded as below the Christian or Pagan level.
The key to Mr. Bradlaugh's character, which unlocks the treasure-house of his excellences and defects, and enables the reader to estimate him justly, is the perception that his one over-riding motive and ceaseless aim was the ascendancy of the right through him. It was this passion which inspired his best efforts, and also led to certain aberration of action. But what we have to remember now, and permanently, is that it was ascendancy of the right in political and theological affairs that he mainly sought for, fought for, and vindicated. It is this which will long cause his memory to be cherished.
At the time of his death I wrote honouring notices of his career in the Bradford Observer and elsewhere, which were reproduced in other papers. Otherwise, I found opportunity on platforms of showing my estimate of his character and public services. I had never forgotten an act of kindness he had, in an interval of goodwill, done me. When disablement and blindness came in 1876, he collected from the readers of his journal £170 towards a proposed annuity for me. It was a great pleasure to me to repay that kindness by devising means (which others neither thought of nor believed in) of adding thrice that sum to the provision being made for his survivors. It was a merit in him that devotion to pursuits of public usefulness did not, in his opinion, absolve him from keeping a financial promise, as I knew, and have heard friends who aided him testify—a virtue not universal among propagandists. No wonder the coarse environments of his early life lent imperiousness to his manners. In later years, when he was in the society of equals, where masterfulness was less possible and less necessary, he acquired courtesy and a certain dignity—the attribute of conscious power. He was the greatest agitator, within the limits of law, who appeared in my time among the working people. Of his own initiative he incurred no legal danger, and those who followed him were not led into it. He was a daring defender of public right, and not without genius in discovering methods for its attainment. One form of genius lies in discovering developments of a principle which no one else sees. Had he lived in the first French Revolution, he had ranked with Mirabeau and Danton. Had he been with Paine in America, he had spoken "Common Sense" on platforms. He died before being able to show in Parliament the best that was in him. Though he had no College training like Professor Fawcett, Indian lawyers found that Mr. Bradlaugh had a quicker and greater grasp of Indian questions than the Professor. It was no mean distinction—it was, indeed, a distinction any man might be proud to have won—that John Stuart Mill should have left on record, in one of his latest works, his testimony to Mr. Bradlaugh's capacity, which he discerned when others did not. Like Cobbett, the soldiers' barracks did not repress Bradlaugh's invincible passion for the distinction of a political career. In the House of Commons he took, both in argument and debate, a high rank, and surpassed compeers there of a thousand times his advantages of birth and education. That from so low a station he should have risen so high, and, after reaching the very platform of his splendid ambition, he should die in the hour of his opportunity of triumph, was one of the tragedies of public life, which touched the heart of the nation, in whose eyes Mr. Bradlaugh had become a commanding figure.