"At first, though I disagreed with you, I thought you honest, for you had the repute of an honourable man, and you said that it was not from any desire to prevent my taking my seat, but from a desire to prevent the profanation of the oath, that you were prompted to act as you did. You had been present in the House when John Stuart Mill took the oath, and you raised no objection. You have been present in the House when other members, whose heresy is matter of common repute, took the oath, and you have rested silent. Yet I counted you a fair English gentleman, and I believed your word in any case. But now, from your speeches outside the House, I find that you claim to hinder me from sitting in Parliament, whether by complying with the law as it now stands, or by means of any change which may be proposed to meet your objection. At Manchester you justified your action on the ground that there was a general feeling in the country against me personally[157]—a dangerous argument, even if it were well vouched. But how is this feeling to be tested? Nearly all the meetings called against me have been lamentable failures, despite the most ridiculous precautions. Almost every meeting called in my favour, and this whether or not I have been personally present, has been an enthusiastic success.

"And yet the very vilest means have been resorted to to damage me in the public mind. In your presence at Manchester, and without one word of rebuke from you, one distinguished and noble member of your party repeated against me some of the utter falsehoods of the Varley pamphlet, although I had given you in writing my distinct assurance of the untruthfulness of much of that pamphlet.... To make a show against me, petitions have been sent round the country to hundreds of Sunday Schools, and little children by the score have been compelled to affix their signatures. Two petitions presented by yourself from Glasgow and York contain hundreds of signatures of lads and girls under twelve years of age. Orange Lodges, Roman Catholic organisations, and the machinery of the English Church Associations have been utilised to procure signatures."

Northcote replied:—

"I cannot admit that there is any foundation for the charge of illegality which you make against the House of Commons. But I must decline to enter into controversy with you upon the general subject of your case. I can only say that I have acted from a sense of public duty, and from no personal motives; and that I see no reason for doubting the propriety of the course which I have pursued."

But even those Liberal members who had voted on his side were for the most part quietly acquiescent in the injustice done, regarding a wrong to one "unpopular" man as a small matter. The only member who persistently protested was Mr Labouchere, for whose courage and constancy throughout the whole struggle no words of praise could be too high. In the circumstances there was nothing for it but to rouse the country, and this Bradlaugh did as only he could. It is difficult now to realise the enormous amount of energy he had to spend. While his cases were pending in the higher courts, he was doing three men's work outside. Thus in the week 18th to 24th July we find him spending three days fighting his case in the hot and crowded Court; holding three night meetings in London; attending a Freethinker's funeral (where the sight of the grief of the widow and children made him quite break down); speaking at a great demonstration of miners in the north; giving three lectures in South Shields; and holding a huge gathering in the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. He knew he was drawing terribly on a constitution which, though of a giant's strength, had for many years been doing giant's work; but he never flinched in a battle while he had any strength left. His plan was to evoke a clear expression of feeling on behalf of his claim in all the large towns, to hold a mass meeting in Trafalgar Square, and then again to present himself at the House; and if the House had been capable of looking at the issue half as reasonably as the constituencies did, it would have been promptly settled. Wherever Bradlaugh went, he got unanimous votes in his favour. At one stage he reckoned that out of a series of audiences amounting in numbers to 75,000, only two hands had been held up against his claim. It was wonderful to see how he swayed audiences against their own prejudices. He must have been listened to by thousands of men who disliked him and his opinions equally; but they simply could not resist the appeal for a just judgment. I well remember how, when he spoke in Edinburgh in 1881, he extorted a vote from a general audience there. The body of the hall was filled with middle-class citizens, few of whom had any sympathy with his propaganda, and many of whom must have strongly resented his "notoriety;" in the gallery were a number of Tory students, with the manners of their kind; and post-cards had been freely circulated with a view to an organised opposition. At the outset the students did their best, but Bradlaugh's voice rose easily above their din; a quick repartee or two to their interruptions turned the laugh against them, and soon he was quietly listened to.[158] At the close he made the usual call for a show of hands on his claim. As one of the promoters of the meeting, I was interested in watching the manner of the response; and I can still see the respectable church-going shopkeepers slowly and as it were compulsorily raising their right hands at the call of the Atheist and Republican. Only some dozen, as far as I remember, voted "on the contrary." This was in an audience mainly unsympathetic. At Trafalgar Square, of course, he was in a dense army of enthusiastic supporters, including many delegates from provincial towns. The Dublin Freeman then, owned by Mr E. D. Gray, and the organ of Mr Parnell's party, intimated beforehand that "no large assembly can take place within a mile of Westminster Palace and the police will very summarily dispose of Mr Bradlaugh's ragged followers." The police made no such attempt; and it was well they did not, for the followers were neither ragged nor timorous, and their blood was not just then very cool.

This was on 2nd August; it was on the next day that Bradlaugh again presented himself at the House; and then occurred the crowning episode in the struggle—crowning alike in point of the dastardliness of the tactic employed against him and the desperation to which it momentarily moved him.

His unanswerable contention was that the House was bound to do something to settle the case. It ought either to declare his seat vacant or take some course to permit of his sitting. To keep an elected member out of his seat without disputing the validity of his election was a course which only a majority of professed lawbreakers could consistently take; and the resolution excluding him from the House was merely a puerile evasion by the majority of the legislative problem they had raised. When, however, Bradlaugh presented himself afresh, that puerile policy was adhered to, only in a fashion that developed puerility into brutality. The Liberal Government acquiescing in the vote of the majority, the matter was left to the police, who treated it as a police question, some of them behaving with that exuberance of insolence and ruffianism which they so often and so naturally bring to their task. Their way of seizing him angered him in a way in which he had never been angered before. A few extracts from the newspaper accounts of the time will suffice to tell what happened:—

"Mr Bradlaugh, after having waited till the Speaker had taken the chair, claimed admission to the House. He was in the first place opposed by the regular officials. 'I am here,' he said, 'in accordance with the orders of my constituents, the electors of Northampton; and any person who lays hands on me will do so at his peril!'" Attempting to enter the House, he was seized by the messengers, but their resistance being insufficient to overcome the force they roused him to use, the police were called upon. "It was said by Inspector Denning that four ordinary men certainly could not have expelled Mr Bradlaugh, and that the ten constables, all remarkable for strength and activity, who were engaged in forcing him down the lobby stairs, found their task far more arduous than they had expected." They had him by the throat, arms, and collar, and he had some of them in the same hold. "The strong, broad, heavy, powerful frame was hard to move, with its every nerve and muscle strained to resist.... The sight, little of it as was seen from the outside, soon became sickening.... An almost deathlike pallor had spread over Mr Bradlaugh's sternly-set features; he was gasping for breath, his body was bent, and he was in a state of exhaustion painful to see. His black frockcoat was much torn, his collar and shirt disarranged, and he himself in a condition of intense mental excitement and bodily prostration.... The Trafalgar Square phrase that this man might be broken but not bent occurred to minds apprehensive at the present appearance of him.... His face was deathly white, and there was about the mouth an expression of determination, which those who witnessed it cannot readily forget. Overborne by the desperate struggle, he fainted, but soon recovered when water was brought to him."

When Bradlaugh appeared at the door in the grasp of the police there was a cry of wrath from the assembled crowd, which told of a source of "force" that might conceivably be tapped. At another door Mrs Besant stood, at the head of a mass of followers, who, hearing vaguely of what was happening, were urgent in their demand to be let take the law in their own hands. A word from her, a word from him, would have sent the multitude headlong into the House. They were not a chance London mob: they included thousands of staunch working men from all parts of the country, who had attended the demonstration the day before. They were wroth with the callous iniquity that had been and was being worked by the majority inside. And Bradlaugh, standing bruised and shaken and insulted on the steps, hardly able to breathe, but with the fury of physical struggle still upon him, had a supreme temptation. In his first anger, alluding to the brute force used against him, he had said to Inspector Denning, "I shall come again with force enough to overcome it;" but he did not carry out his threat, though he might have done it on the instant. Had he but lifted his hand to beckon, the ten policemen would have been tossed aside like chaff by the host of his infuriated friends; the House could have been stormed, and his enemies could have been kicked wholesale into the river. With a supreme effort, he controlled himself, and forbade all outbreak; proceeding further to go through the form of trying again to enter the House, so that Inspector Denning should have to make a form of resistance, on which he might found an action. It was well. But it is believed that there are still some who, perfectly recognising the superiority of the course actually taken, can never wholly stifle, on retrospect, an obscure and unreasoned but haunting wish that the multitude had taken its own way, sacked the House, and thrown, if not the Speaker and his wig, at least Lord Randolph Churchill, and Sir Stafford Northcote, and Sir Henry Wolff, comrades three, into the Thames, that ancient river and unclean.

The picture as it stands is memorable enough. I have been told that James Thomson the poet, the estranged friend of Bradlaugh's youth, was among those at the gates; that he turned pale at the sight of the struggling group; and that his companions could hardly withhold him by force from rushing to his old comrade's help.