The first important task of Bradlaugh on the re-assembling of Parliament was to fight this cause of the right of public meeting in Trafalgar Square. It had been badly enough managed by others. In January he wrote:—
"The conviction of Messrs Cunninghame Graham and Burns for unlawful assembly is, I fear, in great part due to the foolishly boastful evidence of Mr Hyndman and Mr Tims. If the first had been a Crown witness, his evidence on cross-examination could not have been more mischievous to the accused, on the count on which a verdict was found against them; and the incautious replies of Mr Tims to the counsel for the Crown were almost as fatal."
The Government on their part had carried adroitness to the point of cowardice, refusing to arrest Mrs Besant when she sought to have a legal trial on the merits of the right of meeting. The effect of it all was that not only the Liberal leaders, but such journals as the Daily Chronicle and the Daily News, took the line of deprecating any further public meetings in the Square. Bradlaugh, standing firmly to the claim of right, commented gravely on the promoters of the meeting for "bringing together a huge mass of people whom nobody was prepared to lead or to control;" and he expressed his regret that Mr Saunders, a prosecution against whom was laid and then departed from, should have let the legal question drop. Before the assembling of the House certain metropolitan members, learning that Bradlaugh was determined to raise the question by an amendment on the Address, took the unworthy line of protesting that, as a metropolitan matter, it was no business of his. He offered to leave it to Sir Charles Russell, as the most capable of dealing with it. Sir Charles promptly replied that no one could handle it better than Bradlaugh, but undertook the moving of the leading amendment. In addition to such difficulties Bradlaugh had the trouble of opposing the action of Mrs Besant on the newly-founded Law and Liberty League, promoted by herself and Mr Stead, with its "Ironside Circles," and other risky arrangements for meeting force with force.
When the House met, Bradlaugh took occasion, before the debates began, to make a personal statement on a matter that had of late frequently come before the public. In February of 1886 he had offered in the House to show that large sums of money, excessive for such a purpose, had been supplied by leading Conservatives of both Houses of Parliament for the promotion of a Trafalgar Square demonstration for "Fair Trade," organised by a Tory agitator named Peters, which had culminated in a riot. Peters had at the time blusterously denied this, but had declined Bradlaugh's challenge to a formal investigation before an arbitrator as at nisi prius. In the recent prosecution of Messrs Burns and Cunninghame Graham at Bow Street, Bradlaugh had been pressed by the Crown Counsel on this point, had reaffirmed his statement, and had added that one of the cheques, which he had seen and was prepared to trace, was from Lord Salisbury. This statement was first denied by Lord Salisbury in a letter to the Times (2nd December), and was afterwards characterised as wilful perjury in a published letter from his secretary to one Kelly, a colleague of Peters. On the first denial Bradlaugh promptly offered to have the matter investigated before a Committee of the House of Commons. This offer Lord Salisbury neither accepted nor declined. Bradlaugh now asked the Government to agree to a Select Committee of Investigation, pointing out that he lay under an imputation of perjury from the Prime Minister on a statement which he had made in Parliament. An action for libel, however, had been already begun against Bradlaugh by Peters; and the Ministry, after waiting a few days, answered that the matter was not a proper one for a Select Committee, especially as a lawsuit on it was pending. Bradlaugh, however, pointed out that the action in question could not raise the real issue, and offered to raise it if Lord Salisbury would acknowledge the publication of the letter to Kelly, signed by his secretary. This acknowledgment he sought to obtain by letter, but after delay the noble lord took the singular course of declining to accept legal responsibility for the publication of the letter, as he had not consented to it. When, however, Bradlaugh read this letter of disclaimer in the House, Lord Salisbury sent him a secretarial letter (22nd February) referring to the original letter to the Times over his lordship's own signature (in which the truth of Bradlaugh's statement had been denied without charging perjury), and admitting his lordship's legal responsibility for that. That letter, however, was not actionable, and Bradlaugh had replied to it at the time, as he now pointed out. Lord Salisbury then wrote (25th February), repeating that he could accept no responsibility for his letter to Kelly, concerning whom he made the curious statement that he, too, was affected by Bradlaugh's false and injurious charges, though Bradlaugh had never mentioned Kelly's name in the matter. His lordship, however, professed his readiness to facilitate a legal investigation of Bradlaugh's statements, which his lordship inaccurately professed to reproduce. Bradlaugh, protesting against his lordship's tolerating the publication of the charge of perjury, and never once apologising for it, answered that he preferred to have the charge stated in the words in which he made it, and in none other. No reply was offered, and the matter was left to be settled by Peters' action for libel.
The debate on the Trafalgar Square question did not come on for a week or two, and in the meantime one notable episode occurred over a remark made by Bradlaugh in the discussion on an amendment to the Address concerning the Scotch Crofters. The report runs:—
"Mr Bradlaugh said he understood the Chief Secretary to say that the cause of the evil they had to deal with in the Highlands was over-population, and that the sole remedy for this difficulty was emigration. He also understood the right hon. gentleman to denounce the reckless increase of population in that district during the last forty or fifty years. He felt some astonishment that the right hon. gentleman should put forward such an argument, when he remembered that the right hon. gentleman, and those who sat around him, tried before all England to make him appear as one of the most immoral men alive, because he had tried to teach the people for the last quarter of a century these very evils of over-population, and these very difficulties of their condition connected with reckless increase. It was astounding to hear from the other side such a doctrine put forward to be supported, because, when urged by him in olden times, it had made him the mark for some of the most wicked language that one man could use against another.
"Mr A. J. Balfour: I never in my life used any such language against the hon. gentleman; never, never. (Cheers.)
"Mr Bradlaugh said that, at any rate, the important party of which the right hon. gentleman was then a prominent member, flooded the country with literature containing such attacks, without then one word of repudiation from the right hon. gentleman. But he would not discuss the personal position of the matter further. The sole remedy for the existing distress, according to hon. members opposite, was emigration. But how were they going to apply it? Was the State to undertake the emigration? Were the people to be sent away by force, and to what lands were they to go? In every case they would have to struggle for existence against hostile life-conditions, extremes of heat and cold, hard for starving men to hear. Everywhere they would be confronted with the labour struggle, for we were no longer the sole, or even the principal, colonising people; masses of Germans and other thrifty colonising races were now found in every distant land. Of course, emigration resulted in a few successes, and of these much was heard; but nothing was said about the many miserable failures. Medical men in America and Canada could tell many heart-rending stories of madness supervening on the home-sickness that embittered the emigrant's life. There was no country where pauper emigration would be welcomed. State emigration, if at all, must include on a large scale other distressed subjects. This was impracticable. Emigration of charity was mockery save to the veriest few. No; emigration ought not to be thought of as a remedy until other means had been tried, until the unjust conditions which hampered the poor, and which had been artificially created by the class to which the hon. gentlemen opposite belonged, had been swept away. ('Hear. hear.')"
Thus again did Bradlaugh prove that his Neo-Malthusianism was anything but an argument against the political improvement of the lot of the people. The emphatic declaration of Mr Balfour may be held to class him with Mr John Morley, Mr Leonard Courtney, and the late Lord Derby, as a believer in the importance of restriction of population; but it is not on record that he, any more than they, has sought to communicate his belief to the public or his party; and it is certain that, as Bradlaugh remarked, he never said a word in deprecation of the attacks of his fellow-Tories on Bradlaugh as a Neo-Malthusian at a time when such attacks were a main means of keeping him out of his seat.
When at length the Trafalgar Square question was reached (1st March), being raised in a masterly speech by Sir Charles Russell, Bradlaugh followed with one perhaps not less effective, which, lasting till midnight, had to be continued on the following evening. It included a sharp indictment of the conduct of the police, and a broad suggestion that the authorities seemed to have made use of agents provocateurs; and it made short work of the official pretence that the Square was Crown property, as having been constituted out of the King's Mews—a statement on a par with Mr Burdett Coutts' citation of the old Act against certain meetings near Parliament without the all-essential clause specifying the kind of meetings forbidden. The King's Mews, Bradlaugh pointed out, had formed only a very small part of the ground, while the rest had been bought and paid for with public money. He challenged an investigation of the conduct of the police, and wound up with an earnest appeal to "those who were elected as Liberals" to resist the tyrannous policy of the Government. The Home Secretary was stung into promising an investigation of the charges against the police; but it is matter of history that the Liberal leaders homologated the action of the Tory Ministry.