CHAPTER IV.
CLOSING YEARS.
1886.
Admitted at last to the seat for which he had fought so long and so hard, Bradlaugh set himself strenuously to work to make up for lost time. With nearly every quality that goes to make a good legislator, and with the most abundant political experience from his youth up, he had reached his fifty-third year before he sat in his place in Parliament by secure tenure. He had fought for that place, in all, eighteen years—chronically during twelve of them, against constitutional opposition; continuously through six of them, against gross injustice. And in these last six years, unhappily, his life went very much quicker than the years. Those who had lived by him through it all recognised that it had made him an old man. A certain aging effect seems to have come from the terrible attack of typhoid fever in New York in 1875; but still in 1880 his portraits show him in his prime, the face mature without being furrowed. In 1886 he looked far more than ten years older. The long battle had left its dire marks.
No private member in his prime, however, went to work in the Parliaments of 1886 with such energy. Before January was out he had obtained leave to bring in his Land Cultivation Bill,[190] which was backed by Mr Joseph Arch, Mr Thomas Burt, and Mr Labouchere; and he was extorting from the officials exact details as to the Perpetual Pensions, against which he had already for years agitated outside. In March he obtained from the new Liberal Ministry the appointment of a Select Committee on the subject. The debate on Mr Jesse Collings' amendment to the Address, calling for labourers' allotments—the amendment on which the Tory Ministry were thrown out—gave him his first opportunity of striking a blow at the party which for him was identified as much with tyranny in general as with tyranny towards himself. In February he gave the first notice of his intention to raise a question which he later pushed far—that of market rights and tolls; his first move being to call for a return giving minute particulars as to the state of the case in each municipal borough in England and Wales. And in the same month he was vigorously pressing his proposal for a Labour Bureau on the lines of that of Massachusetts—a proposal to which the Government promptly acceded. In March he took a step abundantly justifiable on public grounds, in moving the reduction of the monstrous vote of £12,000 to Sir H. D. Wolff for six months' unprofitable service abroad, and £3000 more for telegrams in connection with his mission. And he was further able to connect another enemy, Sir Henry Tyler, with systematic breaches of the Truck Act on the part of the Rhymney Iron Company, of which he was a director. Bradlaugh characterised the action of the Company as part of "an infamous system by which poor men are defrauded of part of their earnings." The result was a Government prosecution and the infliction of the fullest statutory penalty. In the way of direct service to labour, he was in the same month appointed a member of the Select Committee on the Employers' Liability Bill, on which he worked hard and carefully. In April came the epoch-marking Home Rule Bill, in the debate on which he made a powerful speech in support, loudly cheered by the Home Rulers who had so long helped to exclude him. He was emphatic against the exclusion of the Irish members, but urged that such points should be left for discussion in committee; and he did his best outside for the second reading by organising a great mass meeting in St James's Hall, presided over by Mr Labouchere, which was in its way a great success, a multitude coming sufficient to fill the hall twice over. His own Land Cultivation Bill came to its second reading; and his speech upon it was well received, though he saw fit not to try to press it to a division. Again in June, shortly before the decisive division, he delivered a second and longer speech in support of the Home Rule Bill, to listen to which to the end Mr Gladstone delayed his dinner; and on the dissolution he issued an "Appeal to the Electors: Mr Gladstone or Lord Salisbury: Which?" He had done more than justice by the people whose representatives had most zealously done him injustice. Readers of his journal had written to urge this on him as one reason for opposing Home Rule. He answered: "If I cannot try to do justice to my political and religious enemies, I am unfit to be a legislator." On the merits of the reform he tersely observed: "Home Rule is no four-leaved shamrock, but it is the beginning of justice."
In the new General Election, a new excitement was given to the contest in Northampton by the candidature of a Liberal Unionist, Mr Turner, a leading local manufacturer, in coalition with a Conservative. His supporters were extremely confident; but when the vote was counted the figures stood: Labouchere, 4570; Bradlaugh, 4353; Turner, 3850; Lees, 3456. On the declaration of the poll, Mr Turner, being shouted down by the crowd, addressed to the reporters the intimation that he "came forward for the first time to wrest the representation of the town from the greatest and most mischievous demagogue of the present century." But by this time the old obloquy had considerably quieted down. At the beginning of the year the Bishop of Peterborough, Dr Magee, had published a review article in which, while making hostile allusion to Bradlaugh—doubtless in recollection of old criticisms—as an Atheist "whose name certainly neither softens nor sweetens any controversy with which it is connected," he declared forcibly against the Parliamentary Oath altogether. As he truly observed,
"Whatever else our present Parliamentary Oath was designed to effect, it was never designed to keep Atheists out of Parliament. It was, and is, strictly a political test, and for a purpose happily quite remote from modern English politics. It is dynastic.... It does not even ... exclude Republicans; for, should the Parliament which imposes it decide at any time upon the ultimate abolition of monarchy, there would then be no 'successors according to law' to whom to be faithful.... As a political test, it is practically all but obsolete.... It does not even incidentally and indirectly act as a religious test, for no Atheist that we know of has ever refused to take it."
Oddly enough, while arguing for the abolition of the Parliamentary Oath, the Bishop proposed to "retain" the oath in courts of justice, being apparently unaware that there it was already to some extent optional. His opinion on the other point, however, counted for something; and though an appeal was made to the Liberal ministry, as it had been made to their predecessors, to prosecute Bradlaugh afresh for sitting and voting, the ministry refused, and the matter dropped once for all. There was also, of course, a cessation of the attacks on him by Conservative members. One, a Mr E. H. Llewellyn, at a Primrose League meeting early in the year, scurrilously spoke of him as having "seemed more as if he spat upon than kissed" the Testament in taking the oath; but for this congenial indulgence Mr Llewellyn had to make a public apology to Bradlaugh and to the House of Commons alike. Bradlaugh was an excessively inconvenient enemy to have at close quarters.
No one knew this better than Lord Randolph Churchill, who was now promoted to the leadership of the House of Commons over the head of Sir Michael Hicks Beach. "The most bitter enemy of the Tory party," wrote Bradlaugh, "could hardly have planned for it greater degradation than this leadership." One Tory journalist attributed to him, quite falsely, a proposal to hiss Churchill on his first rising to address the House. That was not his way of fighting. The "new leader," on his part, was extraordinarily conciliatory. When the new Parliament met in August, Churchill made not even a sign of wish to stand again between Bradlaugh and the oath; and when Bradlaugh made his important motion that the House do not assent to the usual Sessional Order prohibiting the interference of peers in elections, his lordship actually offered him a committee for the following year to frame another Order instead, admitting that the existing one was habitually ignored. Bradlaugh, however, pressed the matter to a division, when 126 members supported him, the Liberal leaders voting with the Tory majority against him. His object had been, as the vigilant Newdegate noted, to take the "first step to getting rid of the House of Lords." By allowing peers to interfere freely in elections, he proposed to strike at their hereditary privilege. But the time for such a measure was not yet.
It was understood to be on Churchill's urging, again, that two months afterwards the Tory Attorney-General entered a stet processus in the still outstanding appeal to the House of Lords, thus ending an action which the Gladstone Ministry had declined to end at Bradlaugh's request. But Bradlaugh in no way slackened his hostility on this score. On 19th September, in a discussion on the committal of Father Fahy for using threatening language towards magistrates, he reminded the House how its leader had once declared in the House that the Crown could procure the decisions it wanted from certain judges. Churchill, entering the House later, and learning what had been stated, assured Bradlaugh that he had been entirely mistaken, and gave the statement an unqualified denial. On Bradlaugh saying he thought he was right, Churchill made the curious answer: "I am sure he cannot find anywhere a record of my having said such a thing." Bradlaugh immediately went to consult Hansard, and not finding the passage he had expected, came back and frankly confessed the fact to the House. But on turning back he found that he had made an equivalent statement in his letter to Northcote on 1st March 1884, and that Northcote, while disputing in his reply certain of Bradlaugh's assertions, lest he should be taken to admit them, did not dispute this. A more leisurely search in the newspaper files cleared up part of the mystery. Churchill had repeatedly said in effect what Bradlaugh had attributed to him. In at least three speeches (30th April 1883; 21st February 1884; 12th June 1884) he had directly and indirectly insinuated that the Government could get the decisions they wanted in a collusive action against Bradlaugh by bringing it before judges who had been Liberal Attorneys-General. What had apparently happened was that the noble lord had struck at least one passage out of the Hansard report when, according to custom, the proofs of his speeches were sent to him as to other members for correction afterwards. Having done this, he felt safe in saying that Bradlaugh "could not find anywhere a record" of such a statement on his part. It was a mistaken confidence; and besides publishing the newspaper extracts at the time, Bradlaugh later found an opportunity to pay off his score with interest.