From Chicago he went to Kalamazoo, and there the news of the death of his lecture-agent compelled his instant return to New York. He was very feverish and unwell at this time; his general health suffering from the effects of the wound in his hand, which had now become greatly swollen and inflamed, and caused him acute pain. The last days of the year found him once more in Boston, and they were made ever memorable to him by his first meeting with Ralph Waldo Emerson at a reception given by Mrs Sargent. As soon as he was able to use a pen—although writing was for some long time a matter of pain and difficulty—he himself described his meeting with Emerson, the hero of his boyhood's days.
"On Wednesday, December 31st," he wrote, "I had my first interview with Ralph Waldo Emerson, at a reception given to him by Mrs Sargent at her residence in Chestnut Street. The rooms were filled by a company of probably the most chosen amongst New England's illustrious men and women, gathered to give greeting to 'the sage of Concord.'... My hostess gratified me soon after my arrival by searching me out amongst the crowd with the welcome words, 'Mr Emerson is specially inquiring for you.' I soon found myself face to face with a kind, truthful-looking man, reminding me somewhat in his countenance of the late Robert Owen. After a few words of introductory converse, I was assigned a chair, which had been specially preserved for me, next to Mr Emerson. The afternoon will always be memorable to me. Ralph Waldo Emerson commenced by quietly and unaffectedly reading in a clear, measured voice his new poem on 'The Tea-party Centennial.' His manner was so gentle that he seemed only reading it to one person, and yet his voice was so distinct that it filled the room with its lowest tones. When Mr Emerson ceased reading, a little to my surprise, and much to my delight, I was called upon to speak. Twenty-six years before, when too poor to buy the book, I had copied out parts of the famous lecture on 'Self-Reliance,' and now I stood in the presence of the great preacher, at least an example of a self-reliant man. After my tribute of respectful and earnestly thankful words to Emerson as one of the world's teachers, I could not refrain from using the spirit of his lines to ground a comparison between the public opinion of Boston in 1773 and 1873. Mr Emerson smiled an almost fatherly approbation of my very short speech; but, what the Traveller terms my 'kindly, courteous, but frank rebuke of the spirit of the age,' called forth quite a lively debate, which was opened by Wendell Phillips, who was followed by Henry Wilson, by the Rev. Mr Alger, and Dr Bartol, then by Mr Alcott, and last, but by no means least, by a notable woman, Julia Ward Howe. Mrs Howe strongly recalled to me the cold, intellectual face of Archbishop Manning, but she manifested feeling as well as intellect in her brief address. Wendell Philips spoke a second time, and to my immense delight, for it gave me a better opportunity of judging the greatest orator in New England. I fully expected that Mr Emerson, who had listened with marked attention and evident interest to the conflicting statements, would give some opinion; but as the oracle remained silent, I was obliged to be content with his pleasant personal words of promise to seek me out for another meeting before my departure for England."
On the same night Mr Bradlaugh lectured to a brilliant and crowded audience in the Music Hall, and the next day the Vice-President of the United States came to congratulate him on his "continued successes," at the same time presenting him with the first volume of his invaluable work upon "The Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America." At Salem, where my father lectured shortly afterwards, he was the guest of Dr Loring, President of the Massachusetts Senate. Then at the special request of the Rev. A. A. Miner, D.D.—who had heard him speak in Boston—he addressed the students and officers of Tuft's College, and found in them a rarely appreciative and enthusiastic audience. On the journey back to Boston Dr Miner told him that he liked his students to hear every man he thought a true man, whatever might be his views. "Some denounce me as a bigot," he added, "and others regard me as a heretic. I wish that when my young men leave me they may be carefully trained to hear all opinions and to form their own."
Everywhere my father found good friends, both amongst the poor and amongst the well-to-do; many old remembered faces, too, he met—poor men who had left the Old World to tempt, and sometimes to win, better fortune in the New. When he visited Niagara, the man who drove his buggy turned out to be a Northampton man and a devoted admirer.
But all the kindness and all the friendliness shown him in America did not weaken his fondness for his mother country and his determination to serve it. He loved his own land, and the men and women there who trusted him and worked with him. In the middle of January he wrote home: "My heart now yearns for Europe; and when I have covered another twenty thousand miles or so ... I shall pack up the remnants of my shirts and come home." Little did he think as he wrote those words that within the brief space of a fortnight he would be on the sea, going back to England as fast as the Java could take him. But such was to be the final misfortune attending his first American lecturing tour. As he was journeying towards Washington to lecture, and to pay his promised visit to Henry Wilson in that city, a telegram from Austin Holyoake reached him, telling him that Gladstone had dissolved Parliament. He stopped short in his journey, and turned back to New York in order to take the first vessel bound for home.
On his return to England he found that his lectures in the United States were represented as having been a dead failure; and that he himself had been mostly laughed at and ridiculed, statements exactly the reverse of truth. That his lectures brought him no money profit was the consequence, not of his unpopularity, but of the terrible financial panic that took place almost as soon as he arrived in the States. Then just as he was beginning to recoup the losses owing to this, he was summoned back by the dissolution of Parliament; and this final catastrophe brought him home with pockets almost as light as when he started; and worse than all, with a tremendous burden of liabilities incurred through broken engagements.
[CHAPTER XXXIX.]
TWO NORTHAMPTON ELECTIONS, 1874.