"I accept the explanation of the noble lord [on the bearing of his words on the Times case], and I can corroborate his statements as to the compression of his speeches, because I used at one time to hear from him expressions which, having unguardedly repeated them without verification, I could not find in Hansard when I went to look for them. (Loud laughter and cheers.) The only mental difficulty I have is to imagine how any process of compression could put words on record which were never spoken. (Loud laughter and cheers.)"
It was as sufficient and artistic a piece of punishment as the House had witnessed for a long time; and Bradlaugh thenceforth considered his accounts with his former vilifier reasonably squared. Besides, in his anxiety to propitiate his powerful opponent, Churchill immediately afterwards declared in a letter to the Times that he did not see how Bradlaugh's Oaths Bill could with propriety be opposed by the Conservative party, whose duty it was, by supporting and passing it, to "secure that the Parliamentary oath in future will in all probability only be taken by those who believe in and revere its effective solemnity." This was written in anticipation of the action of a few Conservatives who, rebelling against their own leaders, obstructed the measure when it came on for discussion after other matters about five o'clock in the morning. Sir Edward Clarke, who had zealously resisted all previous bills of the kind, gave his support to this. Twice over, in a House of 300, Bradlaugh had large majorities—of 91 and 104—against adjournment, but still the motions went on. At length, having sat in the House for eleven hours, he gave way, an act for which some outsiders thought fit to blame him. Some journals, however, took the opportunity to speak of him, on the merits of the question, with a civility they had never before seen occasion to show him. Others made use of the occasion to point out how fully it proved the utter dishonesty of most of the previous Tory opposition to Bradlaugh. Some of the details in the debate gave dramatic corroboration to this view. Colonel Hughes had stood forward as one of the representatives of religion; on which Mr Healy—himself once in that galley—observed that "it was to be hoped Christianity would not be defended by a gentleman who had been scheduled for bribery."
While the Oaths Bill was thus delayed, Bradlaugh contrived by incessant vigilance to get the Truck Bill through Committee in July. He confessed that if he had known beforehand the enormous labour such a Bill involved—"the receiving deputations, the large explanatory correspondence, the huge mass of suggested amendments, the objections from various interests to each amendment, and the utter impossibility of conciliating or satisfying the various sections, some friendly, some hostile, some well-meaning but impracticable"—he might have shrunk from the task. For twenty-seven nights he had watched till the morning hours on the chance of his Bill being reached, and when all was done it seemed for a time as if the Upper House, in its customary manner, would wreck everything. Their lordships' first "amendments" were insufferable, and were sent back to them, the House of Commons backing up Bradlaugh with vigour. Finally their lordships agreed to limit their amendments to a few which, while of course doing harm, did not affect the main work of the Bill, and though some Irish and other members desired to reject it on the score of these, the measure was at length passed.
He had thus in one session carried an important Act, made considerable progress with another, and obtained a Select Committee on Perpetual Pensions and a Royal Commission on Market Rights and Tolls, apart from the Committee appointed by the Government on his former initiative to discuss the action of peers in elections. In the Committee on Pensions his report was unanimously adopted, barring the clauses which dealt with certain payments to the Duchy of Cornwall—in other words, to the Prince of Wales. He had further prosecuted the Corporation of London before yet another Select Committee of the House, effectively damaging one of his enemies in the process, as he had in the previous year secured the prosecution of another for breach of the law in his capacity of a company director. He had seen yet another enemy, Churchill, deposed from his place of pride, and had incidentally overthrown him in debate. All the while he was doing hard work on the Employers' Liability Committee besides speaking often on the Estimates and on the Coercion Bill, putting an ever-increasing number of solid questions to ministers on grievances submitted to him, many of which were redressed, and in particular pertinaciously pursuing the Indian Office as to certain underhand dealings in the matter of the ruby mines of Burmah. No other member's work could compare with it all; and the press decided that "Bradlaugh's Session" was the proper summary of the Parliamentary season. But, of course, such success evoked jealousy no less than tribute. In the carrying of the Truck Act he had not a little experience of the jealousy of labour leaders and others; and while the official Liberal press still partly boycotted him, the Socialist press made a point of belittling or perverting everything he did. Despite his continuous attacks on Tory policy, his Truck Bill was declared to owe its success to Government adoption. The Socialist Reynolds declared that he did little or nothing in Parliament; while the Tory England protested that he spoke far too often. As a matter of fact, he had made some sixty-five speeches up to Whitsuntide, thirteen of them against Coercion. But the circumstance which made his Parliamentary industry absolutely unique was that it was carried on alongside of a continuous course of Sunday lecturing, with special attendances at week-day demonstrations thrown in. When the Sunday lectures were in London the strain was comparatively light, as only two were given in the day at the Hall of Science; but in the provinces it is the Secularist practice to have three discourses on the Sunday when a London lecturer comes, and the physical strain of this, it need not be said, is heavy. Thus for Bradlaugh the two days of the week which other members of Parliament could give to rest and recreation were oftenest simply days of travelling and extra speaking. Now and then he could get a Saturday's pike-fishing on the Lea or on a Thames backwater; once or twice in the year he could even run down to Loch Long for two or three days of the very much more bracing fishing there. Even the holiday became a source of fresh work, for he took up with his usual energy the case of the pollution of Loch Long by Glasgow sewage; and it was due to his persistent pressure that the nuisance was at length stopped. He thus made a rich return for the measure of rest and strength gained from his days of fishing—a gain which was at times wonderful. But though his powers of recuperation were great, the rest-days were far too few; the balance was always heavily on the side of overwork; and so his intimates now saw him year after year showing ever heavier traces of the overwhelming strain of his life. Whether he got to bed early or in the late morning hours, he was always up and at work before eight, attacking his great pile of correspondence, which alone would have seemed to many men to supply a good day's work. Every day's post brought him on an average a round dozen of grievances to be submitted to Parliament, and in every case which he thought worth attention he made careful investigation, always declining to trouble Ministers without good grounds. Then there were the continual letters from poor men of all denominations asking for legal advice gratis—a kind of request he never refused. Yet with it all he found time to write for his journal; and his articles and speeches at this time are as pregnant and efficient as any he ever penned or spoke. Among other things he wrote a weighty little pamphlet: "The Channel Tunnel: Ought the Democracy to Oppose or Support it?" which was widely circulated as the strongest possible popular plea for the undertaking. When next the public is effectively challenged for a vote on that question, it will probably be found that there has been a great transformation of opinion; and not a little of the credit will be due to his pleading. Of the extent of his influence in this and other ways the average metropolitan reader never had any accurate idea, between the grossly unjust attacks of Socialists on the one hand, and the boycotting of the Liberal press on the other. Thus we find him delivering in Birmingham, in October 1887, a great fighting speech on the party situation, of which no report whatever appears in the London papers. It dealt with the question raised by Mr Chamberlain, "Is a National Party possible?" and the answer it gave was a determined and uncompromising attack on the Unionist coalition, this at a time when Liberals and some Radicals were insinuating that he was ingratiating himself in the Tory counsels. This was a type of dozens of provincial addresses delivered by him every year, some of them at immense open-air demonstrations of miners, who always invited him to their great gatherings. Of all this activity the London press revealed hardly a trace, any more than of his hundreds of Sunday lectures every year, of which one or two out of every three were devoted to politics. It is safe to say that no other English politician of his time spoke publicly to such numbers of his fellow-countrymen in the course of each year.
A striking illustration of the new animus against him among "advanced" propagandists came up on the occasion of the deplorable Trafalgar Square episode of 13th November 1887. The Socialist press and some Radical journals sedulously circulated the intimation that "somehow or other Mr Bradlaugh was very conspicuous by his absence," while pointing to his old proceedings in similar crises. He was actually lecturing at the time at West Hartlepool, in fulfilment of an engagement made months before; and next day he was at Hull. On his return he contributed to the Pall Mall Gazette a careful statement of the law on the point of the use of Trafalgar Square, criticising and condemning the action of the authorities, and he followed this up with further protests, while advising the Radical M.P.'s concerned to fight out the case at law, and begging those who trusted him to await such legal settlement. Yet several times since his death it has been stated in the press that he exhumed a forgotten law which entitled the Home Secretary to prevent meetings in the Square. The laws he cited were all to the contrary effect, and were well enough known to those officially concerned; the point having been raised, as above mentioned, over one of his own Trafalgar Square demonstrations a few years before. And when Mr Cunninghame Graham and Mr Burns were prosecuted, he gave evidence on their behalf, making a hasty and difficult journey across the country from Leek to London on a telegraphic summons to arrive in time when they were tried at the Old Bailey.
A paragraph which he published in his journal in this connection will serve to mark the degree of political severance which, with no diminution of mutual regard, had arisen between him and his long-tried colleague and partner, Mrs Besant. It ran:—
"As I have on most serious matters of principle recently differed very widely from my brave and loyal co-worker, and as that difference has been regrettably emphasized by her resignation of her editorial functions on this journal, it is the more necessary that I should say how thoroughly I approve, and how grateful I am to her for, her conduct in not only obtaining bail and providing legal assistance for the helpless unfortunates in the hands of the police, but also for her daily personal attendance and wise conduct at the police-stations and police-courts, where she has done so much to abate harsh treatment on the one hand and rash folly on the other. While I should not have marked this out as fitting woman's work, especially in the recent very inclement weather, I desire to record my view that it has been bravely done, well done, and most usefully done; and I wish to mark this the more emphatically as my views and those of Mrs Besant seem more wide apart than I could have deemed possible on many of the points of principle underlying what is every day growing into a more serious struggle."
The severance spoken of had arisen over Mrs Besant's adoption of Socialist principles, a change of attitude on her part which began about 1885, and soon went the length of a somewhat extreme propaganda, afterwards modified in common with the general tone of the Fabian Society, of which she had speedily become the most active member. The joint editorship had now become a practical difficulty as well as a source of complaint among readers; and in October 1887 it was amicably ended, Mrs Besant continuing to act as sub-editor and contributor. She had fought beside Bradlaugh and for him loyally and well, and though the suddenness and vehemence of her new departure had startled and troubled him, his friendship, as the above paragraph shows, had in no way weakened. He was not the man to break a tie for even a serious difference in opinion; though he was also the last man to do what some Socialists contemptibly accused him of doing—arrange that his colleague should take one line and he another in order to promote the circulation of his journal. He did for Socialists what he did for everybody who got into legal trouble on political grounds, and he gave Mrs Besant ample assistance in fighting the case of those who were arrested by the police for open-air propaganda. The most serious change of position on Mrs Besant's part, her conversion to Madame Blavatsky's "Theosophy," was soon to come. Even when that came, in the following year, he neither withdrew his friendship nor asked her to cease contributing to the Reformer; but, coming after political differences, the new and deep division of opinion undoubtedly pained and depressed him. He was to find, as so many have found, that when success comes something is sure to go which leaves success a different thing from what was dreamt of.
1888.