This address was read in Northampton to a large audience on the last Sunday in June. Two days later, at a public meeting of about four thousand persons held in the Market Square, a vote was taken as to Mr Bradlaugh's candidature, and only one hand was lifted against it.

The issue of this address and the subsequent public meeting produced a considerable flutter in the political dovecots of Northampton. A great outcry was raised at Mr Bradlaugh's unheard-of audacity in putting himself forward without receiving the usual requisition, but, as he calmly explained at a meeting in the Northampton theatre a few weeks later, he had for two years intended to become a candidate for Parliament, and had determined to offer himself to any body of men wherever he thought he had a fair chance of success. He believed Northampton was that place, and in putting himself forward without formal invitation he did not think he had imperilled either his own dignity or that of the electors. The Northampton Mercury,[114] the local Whig paper, affected the utmost scorn for his candidature, saying that he had "no more chance of being elected member for Northampton than he has of being appointed Archbishop of Canterbury." "Nous verrons" was Mr Bradlaugh's only comment upon this declaration, which was afterwards taken up and repeated by different papers as a sort of bon mot.

But the disdain of the Northampton Whigs was well balanced by the enthusiasm of the Northampton working-men. They threw themselves into the work of the election contest, from the very outset, with the utmost zeal and ardour; they delivered the address by hand at every house in Northampton—and the work was all done gratuitously. And so with all the elections in which my father took part: he had neither paid agents nor paid canvassers; he had no paid speakers (beyond, in some cases, out-of-pocket expenses) and few paid clerks; all such work was freely and eagerly volunteered. Nor were the women less ardent than the men. They soon decided upon his election colours, and at the conclusion of a meeting held by him in the theatre in the middle of July, they presented him with a rosette made of mauve, white, and green ribbons, a combination unique amongst election colours, afterwards generally identified with Mr Bradlaugh and loved for his sake. Some of these same rosettes fashioned and worn at this election in 1868 were cast into the grave at Brookwood in 1891, and some others, which their owners had carefully treasured for six-and-twenty years, were worn for the last time on the 25th June 1894, when the statue of Mr Bradlaugh was unveiled in the town whose name will be for ever associated with his own.

Amongst those who came to speak for him the first place must be given to George Odger, who was himself trying to win a seat at Chelsea. Besides Mr Odger there were the Rev. J. K. Applebee, Austin Holyoake, R. A. Cooper, E. Truelove, C. Watts, and others, and everywhere the meetings were large and enthusiastic. Poor men—freethinkers and radicals—throughout the country vied to help in this election; but men in Edinburgh and men in Lancashire could neither vote nor canvass, so they resolved to give aid in money. Long and costly was the candidature; the elections did not come off until November, and thus the campaign continued over five months. Some of the northern towns endeavoured to raise a regular monthly subscription, some a weekly one, and soon long lists appeared in the columns of the National Reformer, long lists made up mostly of small sums, of threepences or sixpences, or shillings; sums of £1 and over were rare, and seldom indeed was there such a heavy donation as £10, Mr Bradlaugh's supporters being, with scarcely an exception, poor working men. At the end of August John Stuart Mill drew upon himself a hailstorm of abuse by sending £10 to Mr Austin Holyoake, secretary of the Election Fund, with the following letter:—

"Avignon, August 28th, 1868.

"Dear Sir,—I enclose a subscription of £10 to the fund for defraying the expenses of Mr Bradlaugh's election to the House of Commons. I do so in the confidence that Mr Bradlaugh would not contest any place where by so doing he would risk the return of a Tory in the room of a supporter of Mr Gladstone, and of the disendowment of the Irish Church.—I am, dear Sir, yours very faithfully,

J. S. Mill.

"Austin Holyoake, Esq."

Much capital was made out of the assertion that Mr Bradlaugh was trying to divide the Liberal vote at Northampton, and so let in a Tory, but it was an assertion entirely without foundation. Over and over again he stated that it was Lord Henley's[115] seat that he was trying to win, and that rather than risk the losing of it to a Tory he was prepared to submit to a decision of a test meeting of the electors. At that time there were 5,729 electors on the register, and of these as many as 3,400 were new voters, so extensively had the new Act affected the voting power in the single borough of Northampton. Mr Bradlaugh's offer to be governed by the decision of a public meeting of the electorate was entirely ignored. "It was in vain," says the writer of the little Souvenir book issued on the occasion of the unveiling of my father's statue at Northampton, "it was in vain that Mr Bradlaugh offered to abide by any fair test that might be devised to settle beforehand which of the two Liberal candidates in the field should go to the poll." A test ballot had been taken at Manchester to decide the claims of Ernest Jones. "If, however," continued the writer of the Souvenir, "the Manchester method were unacceptable, Mr Bradlaugh was prepared to agree to any other form of gauging the opinion of the constituency that was equally just to him" and to Lord Henley. But the Whigs seemed afraid to put it "to the touch," and my father's address was rapidly followed by one signed jointly by Charles Gilpin and Lord Henley. The Tories followed considerably later with two candidates, Messrs Merewether and Lendrick, and later still came a sixth candidate, Dr F. R. Lees, well known as a Temperance advocate. Why he came it is a little difficult to say, for before coming he wrote my father that he was not hostile to him; and he publicly declared that if he were elected in Mr Gilpin's place, he would at once resign in that gentleman's favour. Mr Bradlaugh therefore asked him, as it was impossible that both could win Lord Henley's seat, "to at once consent to adopt some course which will avoid division of the Radical strength." At his first meeting amendments were carried in Mr Bradlaugh's favour, but Dr Lees persisted right up to the last day, and abandoned his candidature "only on the day of the poll, when it was too late to prevent nearly five hundred electors recording their votes on his behalf."[116]