As in his previous illness, prayers had been offered up for him in many churches; and many were the tributes of those who had been opposed to him in religion and in politics; still more, of course, of those more in agreement with him. But his daughter had been driven to take the precaution of procuring signed testimony, from those who had been attending him, that during his illness he was never heard to utter one word "either directly or indirectly bearing upon religion or any religious subject." The eternal pretence of a "recantation" was already current afresh, as it had been after he resigned his presidentship of the National Secular Society, even while he was writing his arguments against Mr Gladstone's book, and re-stating his Atheism as explicitly as ever in his "Doubts in Dialogue." One of the last non-political lectures he had given, in November, had been a manifesto on "My Heresy now and Thirty-six Years ago;" and in December he had discoursed on "Life, Death, and Immortality" with no faltering in his doctrine.
The funeral was on 3rd February, at Brookwood Cemetery. He had never troubled himself as to how his body should be dealt with, so his daughter chose that it should be in the "earth to earth" fashion. At his express wish, written in a will dated some years before, the burial was perfectly silent—an arrangement which caused some regret among friends, and some characteristic phrases about "being buried like a dog" from others, who could not feel the pathos and solemnity of the silent sepulture, amid the uncovered multitude who had come to pay their last tribute at the grave of the man they had honoured and loved. As he had always disliked the shows of mourning and the badges of grief, those who knew his tastes wore none. But the grief of the thousands who filled the trains from London to the burial-place was such as needed no other attestation. They were of both sexes and all classes, from costermongers to right honourables; they came from all parts of England; and soldiers' red coats and the bronzed faces of hundreds of Hindus gave a wide significance of aspect to the throng. Hundreds, many of them from Northampton, had brought the little tri-coloured rosettes they used to wear in the old fighting days; and many threw these in the grave, some saying as they did so that their work too was done, now that he was gone.
Over an hour after the coffin had been laid in the earth, when it was thought that the multitude had passed away, the immediate friends and mourners of the dead went back to take a last look, and they found that a lingering band of devoted men had got the shovels from the workmen, and were one by one obtaining the last sad privilege of casting their handful of earth into the grave.
CONCLUSION.
If the foregoing volumes have not shown what manner of man Bradlaugh was, as well as what he did, they have been written in vain. But it may be fitting to attempt, in a closing page or two, some general estimate of his personality. The present writer is, indeed, conscious of unfitness for the task, were it only because of a personal affection which must somewhat bias criticism. But when a man has had so much evil said of him as Bradlaugh had throughout his life, the inclining of the balance a little way towards love and admiration may be forgiven. Indeed, most men would find it hard to write of him with perfect impartiality. He inspired, as a rule, either aversion or admiration, and the furious enmities of which these pages bear record were in a way the correlative of the intense devotion given to him by thousands.
Such a description would in some cases suggest an intensely passionate and ill-balanced nature, at once winning and grievously faulty; hardly a man of keenly analytic intellect, remarkable self-control, and extreme sagacity. Yet these latter qualities he certainly had. He was in truth a singular combination of chivalrous heroism and practical wisdom—a combination such as I cannot find a parallel for in memory. He had the quixotic ardour of a young enthusiast, an ardour which never left him to the end; and he combined it with a political foresight and judgment such as few modern English statesmen have exhibited. It was the ardour for justice and truth, the forthright sincerity and disregard of convenient conformities, that won him the love and allegiance of men who possessed and valued courage; and it was his keen sagacity that kept their adherence. In modern England he stands out singularly as a powerful and prominent man who chose to set his face openly and systematically against what he held to be shams and delusions, though the impeaching of them brought him the bitterest hostility, the foulest calumny, and a perpetual struggle, where a mere tacit conformity would have meant manifold success, wealth, and ease. There is no country in which straightforwardness and single-mindedness are more belauded than in England, and perhaps none in which they are scarcer. The praise of them forms part of the "cant that does not know it is cant," which Carlyle denounced, and exemplified. Men declare their esteem for courage and sincerity; and when they meet a shining example of these virtues they cast their mud with the unthinking vulgar. No amount of reiteration of phrases about prophets who have been stoned by the Scribes and Pharisees can withhold the average moralist from joining the Scribes and Pharisees when the next prophet shows face. To panegyrise old prophets in platitudes is such a very different thing from recognising a new one in the market-place and taking him by the hand.
Of course, while men do unquestionably dislike an innovator and fighter for being more honest and plain-spoken than themselves, they do not openly put their enmity on those grounds. They must find sins and faults for him: what faults he has they will magnify and multiply. And as, of course, all of us who practise any self-criticism at all can realise that the hostilities we set up, however unjust we hold them to be, have a certain basis in our shortcomings, it is only reasonable to look for part of the pretext of Bradlaugh's enemies in his. What then were his faults? We have seen and heard enough of those falsely imputed: what was his real share of human infirmity? I have heard him accused, by people who were not rabidly hostile, of egoism, vanity, love of flattery, and a tendency to be overbearing. For perhaps all of these charges he would himself have more readily admitted a foundation than would his sympathetic friends. He used to make humorous allusion, in his speeches at Freethought gatherings, to his despotism in the chair. He ruled conferences with a rod, not of iron but of ivory—the rod of absolute technical law. He was the most swift and unyielding of chairmen; and men unwittingly out of order called him not only hard but unjust. But some who had resented his way in these matters have been known spontaneously to wish for his ruling hand when it was still. In all matters where authority and command belonged to the situation, and he was in authority, he ruled with a military firmness and quickness; and as no man can miss making mistakes, he must have made some, though they would be hard to prove. Nay, he himself avowed a certain stress of nervous energy which, on bustling occasions, made him abrupt and impatient of meddling and dilatoriness. This overplus of energy came out quaintly in his inveterate habit of being much too early for a train. He had, in fact, the relative defect of the Napoleonic quality of swift decision and intense determination. Thus, as one Freethinker once told him, his manner was not always "economical;" and the hostilities he aroused were apt to be as intense as the admirations, and to be hindrances to his career. Most of his enemies were themselves certainly faulty men, and not a few were very bad men indeed; but he would not have denied that he might at times have made an honest man his unfriend. Such an abnormal will-power as his[193] cannot miss making some of the manifestations of excess of driving power in the human machine. But nothing could be more mistaken, or more unjust, than to make out that this stress of will-power made him an unjust or an inconsiderate man. On the contrary, tried by the decisive tests of his family life and his relation to his colleagues, he was the fairest and most tolerant of men. Of his family virtues his daughter has told: of his considerateness as an editor all who worked with him can speak. I never knew or heard of one who even came near him in his regard for the independence of his contributors, and in his concern to give the fullest hearing to opponents. In all the essentials of just-mindedness he was singularly well endowed; it was only in respect of physiological over-emphasis that he could ever be impeached. And even on that score, as has been above abundantly shown, it is utterly false that he was ever brutal in speech, or arrogant or discourteous in intercourse or controversy. He was even criticised at times for a certain old-world courtliness, more continental than English, and this long before he had won general recognition. A thousand printed reports and testimonies go to dispose of vague and unsupported aspersions. I am told that in the last year or two of his life, when his nervous and vascular system was breaking up, he was at times sharply impatient of incompetent opposition on the secular platform, but that is a small matter against the self-control of a lifetime. Tried by, or in comparison with, his peers, he needs no vindication.
On the points of "egoism" and "vanity" I have heard him forestall criticism. He confessed that he sought power, and shaped his life to attain his ambitions—these being what they were. He had simply the egoism of an extremely powerful man with an end in view. But it was never the egoism of a Napoleon, stooping to meanness as readily as it hazarded battles. He was an honourable gentleman to the end. Those who deprecated his legal way of fighting legal battles simply failed to appreciate the lawyer's method. That he was a born as well as a trained lawyer many lawyers have admitted; and he fought technically, and thwarted his enemies by technicalities, because law was to him a technique. Nobody but a man with a genuine belief in it as a technical system would have gone to law as often as he did, even to resist gross injustice. On the point of "vanity," again, he frankly anticipated criticism. "Oh, don't say that: I am very vain," I once heard him say to Madame Venturi when she was protesting that a certain statesman's vanity was insufferable. Of course such a confession could not come from a really vain man. He once spoke of "the Irish part of my character" as something that his friends must allow for. A man who can thus detect foibles in himself is not badly swayed by them. As for the charge that he was susceptible to flattery—a variant on the trite and stupid charge of "love of notoriety"—it came latterly, I think, only from Liberals in the House who grudged his popularity among the Tories, they themselves seeing in him a stumblingblock to that species of success which both parties are so apt to set above pursuit of principle. The later Tories, having nothing to suffer in the esteem of the pious from friendship with him, showed him some consideration; while the official Liberals uneasily anticipated the demand from their supporters outside that Bradlaugh should be in the next Liberal Cabinet. It is painful to have to say that to such Liberals his death was a relief. And it is intelligible that they should prefer to see in his geniality and courtesy a fishing for Tory flattery rather than a manly merit. If after years of desperate strife, conscious of failing health, the aging fighter had been sedulous to win goodwill, it would have been small harm; but he was genial out of the very warmth of heart that had made him a fighter. Of his unwavering fidelity to the Radical principles of his life it would be vain to say anything here if the preceding pages have not made it clear. The respect which he won from political opponents in the House was no result of compromise on his part, or of his resistance to certain Socialist doctrines. He was in sharp collision with them on other issues to the last. A good testimony to the genuineness of their respect is that which comes from the late Mr W. H. Smith, in his biography by Sir Herbert Maxwell. It is there told that once in 1886 Mr Smith's private secretary, travelling in the same railway carriage with Bradlaugh, happened to mention the station at which he was going to stop. "Ah, you are going to stay with Mr Smith," said Bradlaugh. "Well, I don't suppose there is a man in the House of Commons or in England with whom I am more widely at variance on many subjects, yet there is none for whom I have more sincere respect." In the evening the secretary told his host that he had travelled down with Bradlaugh. "Indeed," said Smith. "Well, it's a strange thing; I don't believe there is a man whose opinions I hold in greater abhorrence than Bradlaugh's; but I cannot help feeling that there is not an honester man in Parliament." And I have myself heard Bradlaugh speak in private of the genuineness and simplicity of Smith's character—in respect of such a matter as private donations to churches—even at a time when he had penned humorous paragraphs on Smith's head-butler manner of leading the legislature. Both men were honest, and that was a ground of sympathy. And though the professor of the "religion of love" had to express "abhorrence" of the opinions he rejected, he called to make friendly inquiry when Bradlaugh lay on his deathbed—an attention paid by none of the Liberal leaders.
But this honesty, which won him the regard of antagonists when they came close enough to see it, was simply the manifestation in political life of the fundamental and propulsive love of truth and reason which made him an Atheist propagandist. He happened to care for truth and justice all round, where other men were satisfied with a measure of homage to one or two principles they cared to recognise, or prejudices they cared to gratify. He had leapt forward, from his youth up, at the sound of the trumpet in every good cause, where they had mostly been careful to count the cost.
"No fetter but galled his wrist;
No wrong that was not his own."