In combining the propaganda of Freethought with that of Republican Radicalism, Bradlaugh was carrying on the work begun in England by Paine, and continued by Richard Carlile, men whose memory he honoured for those qualities of courage, sincerity, and constancy which were the pith of his own character. The bringing of reason to bear at once on the things of Church and of State, of creed and of conduct, was for him a matter of course, as it has been for the great majority of Atheists, from Holbach onwards, and he held firmly to the old conviction that for free and rational men the only right form of Government is a Republic. He had all Paine's energetic disdain of the monarchic principle in theory and in practice, and, coming to his work in the latter half of the century, he could stand up for Republicanism without incurring the extreme penalties which fell so heavily on the devoted head of Carlile that his hold of his rationalist doctrine gave way under the strain of his struggle, the mind seeking lethargic rest before the body found the final repose. Still the great reaction against the French Revolution, which had made the name of Paine a byword, and the life of Carlile a series of imprisonments, was still far too strong in the fifties and sixties to permit of an avowed Republican and Atheist being regarded without horror by the middle and upper classes. The more famous Carlyle, with all his loud esteem for sincerity and louder repudiation of cant, never dreamt of saying a plain word against the monarchy any more than against the current religion, though his political theories were at all times as far asunder from current monarchism as from democracy. He even went out of his way to speak smoothly of a royalty which did nothing. For a generation to which Carlyle figured as outspoken and veridical, therefore, anything so practical as Republicanism was wildly revolutionary, and so Bradlaugh figured from the first to the average imagination as a violent politician.
Strictly speaking, he was in a sense more violent in his politics than in his anti-theology, because political strife is necessarily more a matter of attack on living persons than is the doctrinal strife between Atheism and Theism. As a republican he could not avoid discussing the personalities of the Hanoverian dynasty, inasmuch as the practical strength of royalism lies in the hereditary self-abasement of men before the hereditary royal person as such, not in any common hold on a monarchic theory of Government. To people who gloried in living under the Guelphs, an exposure of the Guelphs was the only relevant or intelligible answer. We may indeed say generally of monarchy what Strauss said of dogma, that the true criticism of it is its history. But the practical sanity which in Bradlaugh balanced the fieriest zeal, showed him from the first that Republicanism could only advance by way of culture and reason, never by way of violence. He "spoke" bullets and bayonets, but he never for an instant countenanced their use in English politics; and he had always a mixture of wrath and contempt for those who blustered of carrying by force, or threats of force, any reform in the Constitution. Even while he was delivering in lectures his "Impeachment of the House of Brunswick," he constantly declared that the mass of the people were not yet qualified to constitute a republican state; and he declared as much when, in 1873, he spoke at the banquet given by the then Republican leaders at Madrid in his honour as delegate from the Republican Conference which had just been held at Birmingham.
The almost entire subsidence of Republican agitation in England within the last twenty years, after the considerable show of Republican feeling which followed on the fall of the Empire in France, is an interesting and instructive fact, worth a little explanation here. It does not mean that the nation is less ready for a Republic; the fact is quite the other way. Recent tests have shown that in the average working-class Liberal and Radical Club, when the question is plainly raised, there is virtually no feeling in favour of the retention of Monarchy. The old devotion to the monarch as such has almost completely passed away among the more intelligent workers, and now subsists only among their weaker brethren, and in the middle and upper classes. Political movements, however, are made and marred not by pure reasoning but by special stresses of feeling, and there has been little or nothing in the annals of the past twenty years to set up a new stress of feeling against the monarchy in England, while there has been much that has tended to put the republican ideal in the background. It is hardly to the credit of the nation that it lays less store by a great principle or ideal than by concrete points of lower importance; but such is and must long be the fact. The movement which led to the Republican Conference in 1873, to begin with, suffered from the still vivid recollection of the horrors of the Commune. Next it was found that among its adherents were many who were less concerned to set up a British Republic than to further by that means the independence of Ireland. Thus the movement was in itself weakened by want of unity of motive and purpose, and could make little headway against the vast forces of habit and prejudice which buttress the Throne. Even what headway it did make was due largely to the then very common feeling of personal hostility to the Prince of Wales, whose reputed character offended many who would not of their own accord have been likely to raise the question of Monarchy versus Republic. Another ground for hostility to the Crown was and is the sufficiently solid one of its cost; but here again the spectacle of the financial corruption in leading Republics has tended to damp down anti-monarchic feeling. It is pretty clear that, barring any new and special cause for outcry against the Throne, its abolition in this country will only result from the slow accumulation of indifference and of educated aversion to the snobbery which cherishes and is cherished by it. This certainly cannot take place during the lifetime of the reigning sovereign, whose age and popularity alike go to silence serious agitation. It may or may not come about during the next generation.
Bradlaugh used to be quoted as saying that he intended that the heir apparent should never come to the Throne. He never said anything so idle, though in his youth he thought it possible that the Republic might be attained in his lifetime. As years went on, his insight into human nature led him to feel that agitation for an ideal form of Government was less directly fruitful than agitation against the abuses of class privilege; and in the last dozen years of his life, his political work went mainly to reforms within the lines of the Constitution. Apart from this partial change of tactic, his position underwent no change from first to last. His political doctrine may be broadly described as a demand for the fullest admission of the people to the rights of self-government, and further, the application of the powers thus acquired to the removal or reform of all laws framed in the interest of the upper few. This was the ideal he had formed for himself in his youth, and he declined to substitute for it the ideal of Socialism, which had begun to be vaguely popular towards the end of his life. The refusal rested on his experience, and on his character. In his youth he had seen a great impression made by the teaching and the achievement of Robert Owen, whose propaganda came so closely in relation with that of Secularism that in several towns the old halls of the Owenites have been till recent years, or are still, carried on by the surviving followers of Owen, as Secularist meeting-places. For Owen, whom he had met in youth, Bradlaugh had much esteem. "No Socialist myself," he wrote in later life, "I yet cannot but concede that [Owen's] movement had enormous value, if only as a protest against that terrible and inhuman competitive struggle, in which the strong were rewarded for their strength, and no mercy was shown to the weakest."[107] But he was profoundly impressed by the extravagance of Owen's estimate of the present possibilities of human nature; and the later Socialism, like the earlier, represented for him the optimism of unpractical men, with the difference that the later agitators had at once much less gift for social organisation than Owen, and a far more difficult programme to realise. Thus, where Owen set himself to create a State within the State, Bradlaugh addressed himself to making the political State truly democratic—a course the wisdom of which is admitted by the action of the Socialists, who now adopt it. He was in a general sense the successor of the Chartists; and in that connection it is impossible not to feel that if such a one as he had been in the place of Fergus O'Connor, the political advance of the past half century would have been considerably quickened. As it was, his labours have probably counted more than those of any other single man in his day to rouse the workers in the towns to vigorous political action. Before they had the vote, he not only helped to lead the agitation for their enfranchisement, but appealed to them directly on the issues which he wanted their suffrage to settle. It is the fashion of the new Socialism to represent that the old Radicalism wrought for political enfranchisement without any notion of what use the vote was to be turned to. Common sense and common candour will put that account of things aside without much trouble. Bradlaugh for one had very definite notions of what he wanted the vote to do. His programme was both positive and negative. He strongly supported the Radical demand for retrenchment of an expenditure which was always tending to benefit, not the many, but the few; and he detested the policy of "safe" foreign aggression which, after being long associated with the name of Palmerston, came to be identified with that of Beaconsfield. The fact that this policy had the support of some who later figured as Socialists, did not increase his esteem for their after-course. His sympathy with the small and weak nationalities whom England selected for attack was rooted in the intense sense of justice which inspired his whole life. After working for struggling Italy and Poland, he refused to stand by in silence while his own country unscrupulously made war on Afghans, on Zulus, and on Egyptians, on pretexts which all Englishmen would have execrated had they been put forward by Russians. And as he never made popularity his guiding principle, he as instantly and resolutely opposed the aggressions of Mr Gladstone's Government as those of the Tories. In none of the sins of modern Liberalism, whether in Africa or in Ireland, was he implicated. But he had a constructive as well as a limitary ideal, a home policy as well as a foreign; and whereas his course on the latter head will now be endorsed by most Liberals, his social doctrine is still in need of exposition and justification.
§ 2.
A notable fact in the history of popular Freethought in England has been its association with the social teaching of Malthus, which first came before the world only a few years after Paine's attack on orthodoxy. There is nothing to show that Paine ever realised what a blow was struck at his optimistic Theism, by the essay which his fellow-Theist Malthus wrote to rebut the optimist assumptions on the "Political Justice" of Godwin, a Freethinker who held by the revolutionary optimism in the sphere of politics, while tending away from Deistic optimism in philosophy. Paine, who was certainly as much bent on construction as on destruction, sketched a socio-political system which will be found by many readers as impressive to-day as it was found by Pitt. He proposed on the one hand a progressive income-tax, which should yield new revenue and break up large estates, and on the other hand a system of stipends to poor families; annuities to decayed tradesmen and others over fifty, increasing after sixty; provision for the education of the children of the poor; donations for births, marriages, and some funerals; and "employment at all times for the casual poor in the cities of London and Westminster." Save as regards the old age pensions, which represent a great improvement on pauper relief, and the education scheme, all of this plan comes under the destructive criticism of Malthus, inasmuch as it does not recognise the fatal tendency of an untaught population to multiply in excess of the economic possibilities of maintenance. The plan of allowancing poor families at so much per head would have quickened immensely the progress towards national bankruptcy which was carried so far under the old Poor Law. It would have bred paupers by the thousand.
The demonstration of Malthus naturally was not relished by the Radicals, to whom it was first addressed; and Godwin in particular met it with indecent acrimony, as did Coleridge, the Conservative. But the next generation of Freethinkers assimilated the argument, and a certain propaganda for the restriction of families was carried on by Richard Carlile. It is a remarkable fact that two Christian priests have laid two corner-stones of the structure of Atheistic polity for modern England. Butler in confuting the Deists wrought as much for Atheism as for orthodoxy; Malthus, in meeting the remaining Deists on the ground of sociology, confuted their optimism on the practical side. Freethought finally accepted both services, rectifying Malthus as it rectified Butler; and under Bradlaugh it made for science all round. Malthusianism in its original form certainly lent itself to Toryism; and no amount of benevolence on the part of Malthus could make his doctrine acceptable to democracy so long as it was tied down to his Christian ethic. The step which reconciled the knowledge of the law of population with energetic Radicalism in politics was taken when rationalists laid it down that the prudential check need not mean prolonged celibacy. Teaching as he did the all-importance of checking the birth-rate, and knowing as he did the possibility of bringing about the restraint, Bradlaugh had no further cause for misgiving as to political progress than his recognition of the general capacity of human nature to blunder.
He took up the neo-Malthusian position emphatically in his early pamphlet on "Jesus, Shelley, and Malthus," published in 1861, a somewhat youthfully rhetorical, but still a very notable presentment of the three main influences successively brought to bear on the problem of poverty—the spirit of religious submission, the spirit of humanitarian revolt, and the spirit of science. He pleaded for the last. "An acquaintance with political economy," he there declares, "is as necessary to the working man as is a knowledge of navigation to the master of a ship. It is the science of social life, the social science." And he was able in those days of the "orthodox" economics to cite in support of his definition, from the high priest of orthodoxy, a deliverance which may surprise readers whose knowledge of the old economics is not commensurate with their censure of it.
"The object of political economy," says Mr M'Culloch, "is to point out the means by which the industry of man may be rendered most productive of those necessaries, comforts, and enjoyments which constitute wealth; to ascertain the circumstances most favourable for its accumulation, the proportion in which it is divided among the different classes of the community, and the mode in which it may be most advantageously consumed."
And in another early pamphlet on "Poverty and its Effect on the Political Condition of the People," first published in 1863, he put as one of his mottoes, after a more guarded sentence from John Mill, this from Sir James Steuart:—