While to some extent in conflict, as we have seen, with some of his fellow Radicals, he was able to co-operate actively with the Irish party. On the Bill for the Commission to investigate the charges against the Irish members, he made what he confessed he believed to have been one of his best parliamentary speeches, but found it either ignored or "cut down to nothing" in the press. Recognition was forced, on the other hand, by his ever-increasing work on behalf of India, which in the course of the remaining two years of his life was to make his name known to every Indian interested in the affairs of the dependency.
1889.
Though already showing sad signs of failing health, Bradlaugh seemed to begin the session of 1889 with even extra energy. He laid down for himself at once a resolution dissenting from the Government's rate of commutation for perpetual pensions; a motion to expunge from the journals of the House the old resolutions excluding him; a fresh resolution on the utilisation of waste lands; a repetition of his motion for a new Rule as to the calling of members to the table; and a motion for a Royal Commission to consider the grievances of the native population of India; and he further introduced his Bill for the repeal of the Blasphemy Laws, and a Bill for abolishing political pensions. On the first paragraph of the address he made a strong speech in opposition, criticising the foreign, Indian, and colonial policy of the Government; and in regard to Ireland he made another of still greater vigour, setting out and ending with a telling attack on Mr Chamberlain, and vehemently impeaching the whole drift of Mr Balfour's policy in Ireland. Yet, again, he spoke on the Trafalgar Square question.
The first reached of his motions was that for the expunging of the resolutions excluding him in 1880, on which (8th March) he made an extremely temperate speech, assuring the House, however, that on behalf of his constituents he would certainly go on making his motion until it should be carried. The Government strongly opposed, through Sir Michael Hicks Beach and Sir Edward Clarke, who were however answered by Sir Henry James and Sir William Harcourt, and Bradlaugh had 79 votes to 122. He certainly did little about this time to propitiate the Government, making repeated attacks on their Irish policy and their colonial administration, besides keeping up such a fire of questions on grievances of every description, submitted to him from all parts of the world—miscarriages of justice, official misdeeds and tyrannies, breaches of the Truck Act, jobs domestic and foreign, misdirection and ruin of emigrants, fleecing of workers in Government employ, waste of money on royal palaces, Irish oppression, and a score of things which cannot even be catalogued. Probably no non-official member had such a budget of daily business; and certainly none was more in earnest. At the beginning of April we find him writing:—
"I confess that I left the House about 1 A.M. on Tuesday, after a long sitting, in a very bad temper. All our front bench voted in favour of the Government resolution to spend £21,500,000 on the Navy, and to raise £10,000,000 of this by increasing the National Debt."
Of State finance he was the most vigilant of critics; and he caused much Tory resentment by habitually impugning the claim that the old purchase of Suez Canal shares had been a good investment. At least ten millions, he pointed out, had been spent in Egypt in pursuit of the policy of looking after the shares in question.
There was thus small sign of Conservative complaisance towards his Bill for the Abolition of the Blasphemy Laws. As always on such measures, he spoke with extreme concision and moderation, packing his argument with authoritative deliverances, and making only a quiet and simple appeal to good feeling. Similar bills had been introduced by Professor Courtney Kenny and other Nonconformists in the two preceding years, but had come to nothing. At first the promoters had inserted what is known as the "Indian clause," an extraordinary form of enactment which provides that any use of language "likely" to hurt religious feelings and cause disturbance, with the "intention" of so hurting feelings, should remain punishable. This clause had been unanimously rejected by Freethinkers as making fully a worse law than the old, the vague expressions as to "intention" and "feeling" being capable of a construction such as bigots had not ventured to put on the blasphemy laws, and the principle being plainly destructive of that of free discussion. Even one or two religious bodies petitioned against the Bill on the latter score. The dissatisfaction with the clause was so great that it was dropped, but even then it was not till Bradlaugh took up the Bill that it reached a second reading (12th April). It was now opposed not only by Tories, but by pious Liberals, Mr Samuel Smith and Mr Waddy in particular taking pains to get up a panic about the possibility of having impious caricatures distributed at the doors of churches and Sunday schools, and children's minds blasted by blasphemous placards. Finally there voted only 46 for and 141 against the second reading. Most of the Liberal leaders were conspicuous by their absence.
He was better supported in the following month in his motion to dissent from the Government's system of commuting perpetual pensions. It was seconded by Mr Hanbury; and after a debate, in which Mr Gladstone spoke at some length in support of the resolution, the closure was carried on Bradlaugh's motion by 359 votes to 96, and the resolution was only rejected by 264 votes to 205. The moving of the closure in the midst of a speech by Dr Clark—a step which Bradlaugh declared to be fully justified by all the circumstances—gave some offence among Liberals; and just before, Bradlaugh had been made the subject of a furious newspaper attack by Mr John Burns, who pronounced him "the greatest enemy of labour in the House of Commons," and an opponent of "Employers' Liability Bills and other measures affecting the real interests of the people;" described him as shirking the Trafalgar Square question; and attacked him for having resisted a motion to reduce the Lord Chancellor's salary. The last step would have struck most people as one of peculiar chivalry, seeing that the Lord Chancellor had been one of Bradlaugh's most persistent and embittered personal enemies; but as the other items show, Mr Burns was not much concerned as to the validity of his charges. He even chose to speak of Bradlaugh as having sought an interview with him, when the fact was that Mrs Besant had introduced him to Bradlaugh to get the benefit of his legal advice. A more offensive attack was made on Bradlaugh shortly afterwards by Mr F. C. Philips in a serial in the magazine Time. The novelist made one of his characters allude to "a ruffian in the United States—a colonel, I believe—who is a kind of Yankee Bradlaugh, only that he has the courage of his convictions, which Bradlaugh has not." This was by far the least offensive part of the passage; and Bradlaugh, after expressing his surprise that any editor or publisher should permit such a wanton attack, added:—
"F. C. Philips is right in saying, at any rate so far as he is concerned, that I have not the courage of my opinions, for my opinion is that I ought to horsewhip him. As I will not do that, I reprint his words."
The publishers promptly and cordially apologised for the outrage, which had taken place entirely without their knowledge, and which was really a piece of gratuitous literary ruffianism, not easily to be matched in modern times.