Bradlaugh himself would never have claimed that he had shown any special magnanimity in the case; but those who know how much personal interest or pique counts for in political action will recognise the singularity of his course. It belonged to his character, equally with his avowal and advocacy of unpopular opinions. Later, when the question of Woman Suffrage was being pressed on his constituency, he was told by Mr Labouchere, as he had been told by others before, that if the women of Northampton had a vote he would not be returned. His public answer was:—
"If I knew this to be true, it would not hinder me from casting my vote in favour of woman suffrage, even if my vote alone should be required to pass the Bill. I deeply value the representation of Northampton, but the grant of the right of woman to the suffrage cannot be determined by the fact that, if legalised, her exercise of that right according to her conscience would be personally hostile to myself."
It may be doubted whether Mr Labouchere gauged the situation aright. When Bradlaugh stood for Northampton in 1868 and was beaten, the wives and women-folk of his supporters subscribed their scanty pence, and bought him a gold pencil-case. If after hearing the utterance above cited the Northampton women of to-day were capable of voting in the mass against a man so declaring himself, they would indeed give Mr Labouchere a better case against their enfranchisement than he has yet been able to make out. But would they?
§ 6.
In virtue of the qualities which made him a warm friend of Ireland, Bradlaugh was all his life, and in his latter years still more warmly, the friend of India. All his instincts of justice and sympathy were moved by the spectacle of that vast congeries of immemorially immature races, ruled by a bureaucracy of Englishmen, none of whom would for a moment be trusted to exercise similar power over their fellow-countrymen, but all of whom collectively are assumed by their countrymen to need next to no supervision when ruling a "lower" race. Again and again Bradlaugh protested, as other Englishmen had protested before him, against the inveterate apathy with which the House of Commons regards Indian questions, as shown by the scanty handful of members who attend to hear them discussed once a year. The death of Professor Fawcett, "the member for India," left Indian interests ill cared for indeed, and immediately on gaining his seat Bradlaugh stepped into the vacant place, although it was by itself work enough for one man, and he had three men's work on hand besides.
His speech on India in 1883 to his constituents shows the broad and systematic way in which he approached the problem. He studied it with the minute care he bestowed on every subject he handled; and in a few years he acquired by his work an amount of popularity among natives such as had never before been earned by an Englishman outside India, and by few Anglo-Indians. As this work was mostly done after his Parliamentary struggle was over, the record of it belongs to the story of his closing years; but it was only the consistent sequel to his previous political life. He took up the cause of India as he had done those of Italy, Poland, Ireland, of Boers, Zulus, and Egyptians, with no thought or prospect of personal gain, out of sheer zeal for justice and hatred of oppression. And inasmuch as Anglo-Indians of the school of Mr Rudyard Kipling have consistently derided and denounced his Indian policy, it may be fitting to note at this point the advantage that policy has over such opposition in respect of its relation to universal political principles. The doctrine of Mr Kipling's school—who may be defined as barbaric sentimentalists—is that Asia in general, and India in particular, are absolute exceptions to all the principles of European politics. The East, they say, is unprogressive, unchangeable, unimprovable. The most direct confutation of that doctrine is supplied by the simple fact of the persistence of the Congress movement, which at its outset the sentimentalists scouted as a chimera. Whatever may be its outcome, they are for ever discredited, in that they declared the thing itself, when broached, to be impossible. And those whose sociology goes deeper and wider than a rule-of-thumb acquaintance with part of the actual life of a race or a region are aware that India can no more than any other land resist the laws of social transmutation, given the transmuting forces and conditions. It is extremely unfortunate that many Englishmen are ready to accept as final the sweeping sociological dicta of Mr Kipling, on the score merely of his first-hand knowledge of Indian life and his literary genius. Foolish generalisations on social possibilities have been made in every country in every age by men with first-hand knowledge of their theme; and it must be regretfully said that foolish men of genius are among the most eminent darkeners of counsel on such matters. When Mr Kipling gives a particular account of a particular phase of Indian life, Englishmen who in the terms of the case have no knowledge of that life accept the account as a "revelation," when obviously their estimate of it in that light has no critical value whatever. Strong in the suffrages of such judges, Mr Kipling has been pleased to speak of Bradlaugh as being prepared by defective education to take that mistaken view of Indian life which Mr Kipling inexpensively imputes to all inquiring Englishmen at home. The sufficient answer to that criticism is that there are many kinds of defective education, and that nobody can well be further wrong about India than Mr Kipling, inasmuch as he has himself contradicted every one of his own numerous generalisations by others. He first came forward with pictures of the Indian Civil and Military Services, in which they appeared nearly as corrupt as those of Russia are said to be: husbands getting promotion on the score of their wives' adultery, and so forth. Later he saw fit to represent the Indian Civil Service as embodying every virtue a Civil Service can have. As a rule, he pictures the English in India as the "Dominant Race," with impressive capitals, and the natives as being universally cowards. When, however, a native officer can "play like a lambent flame" on the polo-field, and can transgress every law of hospitality by thrasonically declaring defiance to Russia in the person of a Russian officer at a British mess-table, that native becomes even as an Englishman in Mr Kipling's eyes. The simple canon of Mr Kipling is the feeling that any race which thwarts his own must be base. Thus every indiscreet Russian officer must needs be a blackguard, and every disaffected Irishman a ruffian and a sneak; the evil principle being so deep rooted that the Asiatic children of an Irishman spontaneously take to cutting off cows' tails; though at the same time the Irish soldier is a hero of heroes, if only he is duly devoted to "the Queen, God bless her." It will be a bad business for English rule in India when minds which sociologise in this fashion come to be the guides of the British people in their political relations with their dependency.
Bradlaugh, it may suffice to say, was under no delusions as to the present political capacity of the Indian races. He perfectly recognised their bias to rhetoric and their immaturity of character, as well as the enormous difficulties in the way of their political amalgamation. Hence his programme for them was an extremely gradual introduction of the principle of self-rule. Nothing could be more judicious and restrained than his brief address to the Congress on his brief visit to India after his dangerous illness of 1889, within about a year of his death. And the chances are that before a generation is over his view of the case will be the accepted commonplace of Liberal politics; while the notion of a perpetual domination of Englishmen in a country where they cannot rear healthy children will be regarded as a crowning flight of unscientific political sentiment. In any case, it implies no great rashness to predict that an England which ignores the affairs of its subjects as much as possible in Parliament will not long be able to maintain a despotic rule over a people accessible to Western ideas. The Home Rule principle, which was for Bradlaugh a principle of universal virtue, however different the degree of its application to a given case at a given moment, must in time be wrought out in India as elsewhere, if only it goes forward in the West, and the West keeps up its growing intercourse with the East. And it was one of his many political merits to have been one of the first to see this not only abstractly but in the concrete.
Enough has now been said to convey a broad idea of the manner and matter of Bradlaugh's philosophy of life, cosmical and political, as it was developed and acted on by him at the time of his most memorable appearance on the arena of British public life. At that time much work, though not many years of life, remained to him, so that some who then opposed him claimed afterwards that they could not have known his capacities for good, as exhibited in his extraordinary Parliamentary labours. But the foregoing account of his teaching and action will probably suffice to show that his political career was all of a piece, and that at the time of his ostracism he had given proof of all the powers and opinions which were later admitted to do him honour. Neither, as we shall see, did he in later life surrender any one of the teachings of his earlier years. He laid more stress on some and less on others; but he unsaid nothing, and for the most part he did but carry on his youthful programme. Before 1880 he had been the ardent and yet sagacious friend of oppressed nationalities, the advocate of Radical land law reform, the defender of liberty of conscience, the exponent of the claims of the poor against the rich, the preacher of unpopular but all-important doctrines on personal conduct. In the brief period of his first tenure of his seat he wrought vigorously against the abuse of Perpetual Pensions, which he was later the means of removing, though not in a fashion fully satisfying to himself. In the same period he exhibited a constant concern for the remedying of all manner of grievances. As early as 1863, too, he had taken what Mill rightly calls the extremely undemagoguelike line of publishing a pamphlet in favour of Proportional Representation, on the lines of Hare's scheme—a "counsel of perfection" still too high for most democrats.