When the cheering and the addresses and resolutions had been got through, he proposed as his successor in the Presidentship Mr G. W. Foote, the able editor of the Freethinker and the leading lecturer in the movement; and on Mr Foote's being unanimously elected, he handed over to the new President the hammer of office, with the words: "I give it to you, George William Foote; and I trust that when it becomes your painful duty to resign, as I do now, the progress that has been made in the cause while you have held it will be such as to compensate for the pain."
In dismissing the meeting he gave it some grave words of counsel:—
"The battle of Freethought in this country is not over. There are signs, not far off, of possible strife, and there will be needed wise heads, cool heads, and firm hearts. There is a tendency to renew the anti-Jewish cry; and you may easily, in connection with the lower phases of the Salvation Army, get excitement and tension that need a greater self-command than is always shown among us, if personal conflict is to be avoided. The forthcoming report on sweating may bring about an attempt to raise the anti-Jewish cry; and it is impossible to have strife between religions without the possibility of the various religions turning on the one party that is outside all. One element of danger in Europe is the approach of the Roman Catholic Church towards meddling in political life.... Beware when that great Church, whose power none can deny, the capacity of whose leading men is marked, tries to use the democracy as its weapon. There is danger to freedom of thought, to freedom of speech, to freedom of action. The great struggle in this country will not be between Freethought and the Church of England, nor between Freethought and Dissent, but—as I have long taught, and now repeat—between Freethought and Rome."
To his political work he turned with all the strength he could command. At Northampton his constituents welcomed him back with joyful enthusiasm, and an address from the Liberal and Radical Association formally expressed their felicitations. When he addressed them, he had to stand for several minutes on end before the cheering and singing would subside. The speech had some pregnant passages:—
"I, personally, am not so hopeful as my colleague of a democratic Parliament in England. And why? Because a democratic Parliament in England can only come when you pay each servant there for the work and the service he renders you—(cheers)—and when the worry and the wear-and-tear of earning a livelihood beside his work do not"—he ended the sentence shortly—"sometimes break the man down."
On points of policy he went on to express himself firmly and uncompromisingly as to the Eight Hours' movement, against which he had already written and spoken as being utterly fallacious on the side of practice and pernicious in point of principle; and taking the demand for a time-law as the prelude to a demand for a wage-law, he assailed the entire movement as illustrating the practical application of Socialist theory to practice, both democratic and despotic:—
"As you all know well, I have always been in favour of Trade Unions; as you know also, I have spoken for them, and I have worked with them. (Cheers.) But I say here, I am utterly against—and though it should cost me my seat in Parliament to-morrow, I would be against—the doctrine and opinion that Parliament could thus add one farthing to a man's wage, or one jot to a man's comfort. (Cheers.) What Parliament can do is, remove restrictions; what Parliament can do is, reduce expenditure; and what the Emperor of Germany had better do, instead of summoning a conference of the nations of the world, is to disarm twenty regiments (great cheering), and send back to the plough and to the machine a huge number of men who now live upon the labour of others, and lessen the wage of others, by being soldiers instead of working men. (Loud cheers.) I speak most strongly on this, because I feel most strongly on it ('Hear hear.') I am not one of those, as you will know, who have ever yet, and I have passed too close to the end of my life to have any thought at anyrate to become one now—I am not one of those who have ever flattered the people, or striven to win their favour by telling them that from the Crown or from the Parliament that could be got which could not be got from themselves, by themselves. (Cheers.) I would impress upon you this. What the State gives to you, the State takes from you first; it further charges you with the cost of collection, and with the cost of distribution. ('Hear, hear.') Better by far for you that you should save for yourselves and spend for yourselves, than put into the purse of the State your earnings, of which only part can at best come back. (Cheers)."
Just after the Northampton meeting came the death of the man who had been his right hand in all his struggles there from the first—Thomas Adams, now ex-Mayor. Mr Adams had been a valued friend as well as a trusted agent, and his death came as another of the thickening blows of fate upon the rapidly aging man. In Parliament, all the same, he stuck sternly to his tasks. At the opening he had set down for himself important amendments to the Indian Councils Amendment Bill and to the Criminal Law Practice Amendment Bill; a repetition of his motions as to waste lands and the expunging of the old resolutions excluding him; and a motion on behalf of the financial Reform Association, calling for the abolition of the gold and silver duties and compulsory hallmarking; and he introduced besides an India Bill of his preparation. He at once resumed work, too, on the Royal Commission on Vaccination, on which he had done careful work in the previous year, charging himself as he did to watch over the case for the anti-vaccinators, though not committing himself definitely to their view of the facts. He had been left out of the previous Royal Commission (moved for by himself) on Market Rights and Tolls—partly, it was thought, because Her Majesty could hardly be asked to include the Republican and Atheist in a list of "trusty and well-beloved" counsellors; but in the Vaccination Commission the difficulty was somehow overridden.
In the House, his first long speech was in opposition to the motion of Mr Cunninghame Graham on the Address with regard to the restriction of adult hours of labour by international legislation, and the sending of a delegate to the "Berlin Conference" to support such proposals there. The speech was a very vigorous one, and besides exposing some bad blunders in Mr Graham's figures, argued strongly against the policy of a time-law as a crude and superficial treatment of a far-reaching economic problem. During the course of the year he developed this criticism in various review articles and otherwise; and a systematic treatment of it was to have made a large part of the book on "Labour and Law" on which he was engaged at his death. Among his other Parliamentary discussions he fought his colleague's battle on the occasion on which Mr Labouchere was suspended for persisting in the declaration: "I do not believe Lord Salisbury"—in connection with the escape of Lord Arthur Somerset from a criminal prosecution.