Society the young Charles Bradlaugh, one of the greatest orators of
his age, and one of the most powerful personalities ever associated
with a progressive movement. Early experience of clerical persecution,
which even drove the boy from his father's roof, helped to make him
a fighter, but never infirmed his humanity. In the main self-taught,
he acquired a large measure of culture in French and English, and
his rare natural gift for debate was sharpened by a legal training. A
personal admirer of Owen, he never accepted his social polity, but was
at all times the most zealous of democratic reformers. Thenceforward
the working masses in England were in large part kept in touch
with a freethought which drew on the results of the scientific and
scholarly research of the time, and wielded a dialectic of which
trained opponents confessed the power. [1696] In the place of the bland
dogmatism of Owen, and the calm assumption that all mankind could and
should be schoolmastered into happiness and order, there came the alert
recognition of the absoluteness of individualism as regards conviction,
and its present pre-potency as regards social arrangements. Every
thesis was brought to the test of argument and evidence; and in due
course many who had complained that Owen would not argue, complained
that the new school argued everything. The essential thing was that
the people were receiving vitally needed instruction; and were being
taught with a new power to think for themselves. Incidentally they were
freed from an old burden by Bradlaugh's successful resistance to the
demand of suretyship from newspapers, and by his no less successful
battle for the right of non-theistic witnesses to make affirmation
instead of taking the oath in the law courts. [1697]
The inspiration and the instruction of the popular movement thus
maintained were at once literary, scientific, ethical, historical,
scholarly, and philosophic. Shelley was its poet; Voltaire its first
story-teller; and Gibbon its favourite historian. In philosophy,
Bradlaugh learned less from Hume than from Spinoza; in Biblical
criticism--himself possessing a working knowledge of Hebrew--he
collated the work of English and French specialists, down to
and including Colenso, applying all the while to the consecrated
record the merciless tests of a consistent ethic. At the same time,
the whole battery of argument from the natural sciences was turned
against traditionalism and supernaturalism, alike in the lectures
of Bradlaugh and the other speakers of his party, and in the pages
of his journal, The National Reformer. The general outcome was
an unprecedented diffusion of critical thought among the English
masses, and a proportionate antagonism to those who had wrought
such a result. When, therefore, Bradlaugh, as deeply concerned for
political as for intellectual righteousness, set himself to the task
of entering Parliament, he commenced a struggle which shortened his
life, though it promoted his main objects. Not till after a series
of electoral contests extending over twelve years was he elected for
Northampton in 1880; and the House of Commons in a manner enacted
afresh the long resistance made to him in that city. [1698] When,
however, on his election in 1880, the Conservative Opposition began
the historic proceedings over the Oath question, they probably did
even more to deepen and diffuse the popular freethought movement than
Bradlaugh himself had done in the whole of his previous career. The
process was furthered by the policy of prosecuting and imprisoning
(1883) Mr. G. W. Foote, editor of the Freethinker, under the Blasphemy
Laws--a course not directly ventured on as against Bradlaugh, though it
was sought to connect him with the publication of Mr. Foote's journal.
To this day it is common to give a false account of the origin of
the episode, representing Bradlaugh as having "forced" his opinions
on the attention of the House. Rather he strove unduly to avoid
wounding religious feeling. Wont to make affirmation by law in the
courts of justice, he held that the same law applied to the "oath of
allegiance," and felt that it would be unseemly on his part to use
the words of adjuration if he could legally affirm. On this point
he expressly consulted the law officers of the Crown, and they gave
the opinion that he had the legal right, which was his own belief
as a lawyer. The faction called the "fourth party," however, saw an
opportunity to embarrass the Gladstone Government by challenging the
act of affirmation, and thus arose the protracted struggle. Only when
a committee of the House decided that he could not properly affirm
did Bradlaugh propose to take the oath, in order to take his seat.
The pretence of zeal for religion, made by the politicians who had
raised the issue, was known by all men to be the merest hypocrisy. Lord
Randolph Churchill, who distinguished himself by insisting on the moral
necessity for a belief in "some divinity or other," is recorded to
have professed a special esteem for Mr. (now Lord) Morley, the most
distinguished Positivist of his time. [1699] The whole procedure,
in Parliament and out, was so visibly that of the lowest political
malice, exploiting the crudest religious intolerance, that it turned
into active freethinkers many who had before been only passive
doubters, and raised the secularist party to an intensity of zeal
never before seen. At no period in modern British history had there
been so constant and so keen a platform propaganda of unbelief; so
unsparing an indictment of Christian doctrine, history, and practice;
such contemptuous rebuttal of every Christian pretension; such asperity
of spirit against the creed which was once more being championed by
chicanery, calumny, and injustice. In those five years of indignant
warfare were sown the seeds of a more abundant growth of rationalism
than had ever before been known in the British Islands. With invincible
determination Bradlaugh fought his case through Parliament and the
law courts, incurring debts which forced upon him further toils that
clearly shortened his life, but never yielding for an instant in his
battle with the bigotry of half the nation. Liberalism was shamed by
many defections; Conservatism, with the assent of Mr. Balfour, was
solid for injustice; [1700] and in the entire Church of England less
than a dozen priests stood for tolerance. But the cause at stake was
indestructible. When Bradlaugh at length took the oath and his seat
in 1886, under a ruling of the new Speaker (Peel) which stultified the
whole action of the Speaker and majorities of the previous Parliament,
and no less that of the law courts, straightforward freethought stood
three-fold stronger in England than in any previous generation. Apart
from their educative work, the struggles and sufferings of the
secularist leaders won for Great Britain the abolition within one
generation of the old burden of suretyship on newspapers, and of
the disabilities of non-theistic witnesses; the freedom of public
meeting in the London parks; the right of avowed atheists to sit
in Parliament (Bradlaugh having secured in 1888 their title to
make affirmation instead of oath); and the virtual discredit of the
Blasphemy Laws as such. It is probable also that the treatment meted
out to Mrs. Besant--then associated with Bradlaugh in freethought
propaganda--marked the end of another form of tyrannous outrage,
already made historic in the case of Shelley. Secured the custody of
her children under a marital deed of separation, she was deprived of
it at law (1879) on her avowal of atheistic opinions, with the result
that her influence as a propagandist was immensely increased.