The resolution was seconded and supported amid general uproar,
"while it was confidently stated that in the course of the discussion of it, and during one of the encounters for the possession of the platform, an attempt was made to stab Mr Bradlaugh."[83]
Thus an assemblage which should have done honour to Garibaldi as well as to England, for, as the Advertiser says, "it was composed of the élite of the working classes and a large portion of the middle class," was turned by the Irish Catholics into a fight and a panic calling for the interference of the police. It is little to be wondered at that when Mr Bradlaugh was invited by the Working Men's Committee to attend and speak he hesitated to accept the invitation, feeling as he did that the conveners were not able to control the antagonism of the Irish Catholics which had already manifested itself at other meetings. "I have no wish," he afterwards said, "for immediate martyrdom, and considerably abbreviated my speech when I found that knives were used as arguments."
In the winter of 1862 Mr Bradlaugh made a public appeal to the Freethinkers of Great Britain to raise money on behalf of the distressed Lancashire operatives. He begged them to "waste no time, but at once in your large workshops and in your social meetings levy a rate for the reduction of the Lancashire distress." Those who were Freethinkers amongst the destitute in Lancashire were of course relieved by the General Relief Committee, but naturally they were excluded from the various charitable undertakings carried out by committees belonging to different denominations. As the relief afforded by the General Committee and the Board of Guardians only averaged 1s. 8½d. per head weekly, it will be seen how greatly dependent the distressed were upon the extra help of these other committees. A touching little story of Christian charity versus principle in rags was taken by Mr T. S. Oates, then Secretary to the Lancashire Secular Union Special Distress Fund, from the Rochdale Observer of Dec. 13th, and was, he said, a fair sample of what frequently happened. A benevolent lady belonging to Middleton, on making her usual charitable round, entered one day a house in Parkfield, where she found "poverty in its worst shape." The father of the family was in rags, and the lady told the man that if he would come to her house that evening she would give him other clothes. The man, of course, was overjoyed, but when he was told that after he had the clothes he would be expected to attend church, and if he did not do so the clothes were to be returned, his joy was considerably cooled down. Then it was said that
"after making her statement, the lady left to make further inquiries into the cases of distress, leaving the man of poverty to reflect on the offer made to him. After a short consideration he commenced looking at his unsightly apparel, and then muttered to himself: 'Yo mun poo me through a bit longer, owd friends; it'll do noan to pop mi conscience for a shute of cloas!'"
My father did not preach without practising, although to me it is marvellous how, with his own struggle for existence, he always found a way to help others in their struggles. But this winter it was especially hard: several times he was called away to the Continent, and several times his health broke down, until he was so ill that he had to give up editing his paper, and for some months was also obliged to give up lecturing. Nevertheless, he contrived to keep an engagement he had made to lecture for the Relief Fund in Manchester on Feb. 1, 1863, in which he paid the whole of his own expenses, and so was able to hand £10 over to the Treasurer. Later on in the year he was lecturing again on behalf of the same object.
Almost concurrently with his efforts to raise money for Lancashire, he was making eloquent appeals for funds to aid Poland against her oppressors, and when he had somewhat recovered his health he addressed meetings on behalf of the struggling Poles. He spoke at Plumstead, Deptford, and Cleveland Hall, at Birmingham and Sheffield, where the fire and passion of his speeches evoked the utmost enthusiasm; at Halifax, where people walked eight and ten miles in the drenching rain to hear him, and at other places the details of which are not recorded. "Viva la Polonia" was a cry which, twenty years ago, found "a sympathising echo from every freeman in Europe, from every honest heart in the civilised world;" and my father was behind none in the warmth of his sympathy, or in the activity he displayed to give it practical effect.
Neither, with all this public work, was he unmindful or ungrateful for kindnesses shown himself personally; and so he never forgot the debt he owed his early friend, Mr Jones, who now in consequence of old age and infirmities was reduced to extreme poverty. In the November of this same year he gave the last of his annual lectures for the benefit of his staunch old friend. On this occasion, too, Mr Bendall, the lessee of the Hall of Science, gave the use of the hall—as indeed he frequently did, often at considerable inconvenience to himself—and the proceeds of the lecture and subscriptions amounted to upwards of £8, of which the greater part served to pay the funeral expenses of the brave old man, who, contemporary with Thomas Paine, had played his part in the struggles for a free press, particularly in those which we associate with the names of men like Richard Carlile, Wooler, and Hone.