MR. BRADLAUGH'S POSITION.
MR. BRADLAUGH has got himself expelled, at last, and the question now arises whether or not the electors of Northampton should return him once more to Parliament, as
a protest against what we believe to be the thoroughly uncon- stitutional and illegal action of the House; or should return
some other Liberal, pledged to settle this question of the oath in the right way—i.e., by its simple abolition—and whose in- fluence would not be diminished by the sometimes violent and sometimes rather sly proceedings of Mr. Bradlaugh himself. We believe that the latter course would be the wiser, and the one tending better to settle the question of the unconstitutional theo- logical test into which the oath of allegiance has been trans- formed, by the tactics of the Tory party. We quite admit that the House has placed itself in so thoroughly false a position, that it would have been extremely difficult for any Liberal, who was at all disposed to look at the question, as the Prime Minister felt himself bound to do, from the point of view of the legally- elected Member for Northampton, to vote for the condign punishment of an offender almost spurred and hounded on into disobedience. Mr. Labouchere never said a happier thing than that whenever the House of Commons is exercising judicial functions, it invariably gets into an unjudicial frame of mind. From first to last, in Mr. Bradlaugh's case, it has been exer- cising judicial functions, and from first to last it has been in a thoroughly unjudicial frame of mind. That is the excuse for Mr. Bradlaugh. And we confess that it seems to us a very weighty excuse. The Prime Minister would have done a much more popular thing, and made a much more skilful party move, if, after the " flagrant disobedience" to the Orders of the House involved in Mr. Bradlaugh's conduct on Tuesday and Wednesday, he had himself moved his expulsion. But he would have done a much less just thing. We do not for a moment doubt that Mr. Bradlaugh was deliberately ill-treated by the House of Commons. To say nothing of what we regard as the complete illegality of refusing to let him take the oath, on the wholly inadequate ground that he ought not to have been willing to take it,— which was just as true of the oath deliberately tendered to O'Connell and Baron Rothschild, though the House knew that either of them would be profaning the oath, if he had consented to take it,—to say nothing, we say, of this wholly false position, the way in which the relieving measure sub- stituting an affirmation for an oath was obstructed in the House of Commons, so that it never came to a second reading at all, was complete evidence that the House had no wish to settle the question, but desired only to keep that sore open. This being so, we say that Mr. Bradlaugh had all the excuse for irritation and violence, and for attempts to force the hands of the House of Commons, which
the unfair conduct of the House of Commons could give him. And, therefore, the present writer, at all events, would have shared to the utmost Mr. Gladstone's scruple against pro- posing a condign punishment for the man whom the House of Commons had first hounded on into disobedience. This we admit fully. But having admitted it, we, neverthe- less, ask whether that would justify the borough of North- ampton in returning Mr. Bradlaugh again to the House of Commons. Speaking, in the first place, in the interest of perfect freedom from any theological test whatever ; secondly, in the interest of the Liberal party generally ; and lastly, in the interest of the borough of Northampton itself, we do not think that it would. And we will shortly give our reasons for that opinion.
In the first place, then, Mr. Bradlaugh has not fought the question of principle from anything like the best or highest ground. If he wished, as he professed to wish, to establish the right of one who does not believe in God, and to whom, therefore, an affirmation must be necessarily more acceptable than an oath,—since it asserts all that the oath asserts, and does not encumber itself with what to such an one must be an unmeaning and therefore insincere sanction,—to affirm, he should from the first have steadily refused to take the oath ; and on the decision of the Law Court that he was not entitled to affirm, he should have quietly awaited the passing of an Act enabling him to affirm. His reiterated offers to take the oath obviously diminished, and very greatly diminished, the moral case for such an Act. A man whose conscience is so pliant, that if he cannot -say what he wishes to say in the truest form, he is quite willing to say it in a half-true and half-false form, is not the sort of person for whom public opinion urgently demands a relieving Act. Mr. Bradlaugh's conscience took objection to the oath, it was true, but was so easy in the matter that it was quite willing to swallow the objection, directly the difficulty seemed to be serious. Well, that is not the kind of man whom the public earnestly care to relieve from an unfair position. We do not say that they ought not to have cared. But we do say that the very easy conscience of Mr. Bradlaugh in the matter, immensely discredited the otherwise unanswerable case for relief which a man of more unbending conscience in his posi- tion would have been able to present. It would be far better, in the interests of the abolition of all indirect theological tests, to return a Liberal to the House of Commons pledged to get rid of those tests, but not burdened with the more or less discrediting consequences of Mr. Bradlaugh's unfortunate laxities of conviction.
Then, with regard to the Liberal party, no one can doubt that the notion of its supposed personal responsibility for Mr. Bradlaugh's claims has been very damaging, and unjustly damaging, to it. Not only is Mr. Bradlaugh's personal un- belief quite as little shared by the Liberal party as it is by the Tory party, but even as regards his personal representation of
the undoubted right of a duly-elected agnostic to sit in Parliament, Liberals in general have felt no sympathy for the sometimes shifty and sometimes violent manner in
which that right has been enforced. Few Liberals approved of Mr. Bradlaugh's willingness to repeat an unmeaning oath. No Liberals, we think we may say, justified his attempt last year to force himself violently into the House of Commons.
No Liberals thought him justified in taking the oath against its orders on Tuesday, by a bit of something like harlequinade, or in insisting upon taking his seat in defiance of the House on Wednesday. In a word, the Liberal party which is wholly united as to the duty of abolishing the trumped-up theological test, have felt a very keen dissatisfaction at Mr. Bradlaugh's mode of fighting the question, though many of them have felt, as we feel, that there was a good deal of extenuation for his conduct—being of the type and calibre he is—in the un- fair conduct of the House of Commons.
Lastly, Northampton has certainly some responsibility to bear for those other only too notorious opinions of Mr. Brad- laugh's, which every fair person has tried to exclude from con- sideration in relation to the controversy about the oath, because
they have no logical relation to that controversy, but which certainly cannot but be considered by any constituency, as justly affecting the political calibre and moral weight of the candidate who avows them. And for this reason, again, we believe that Northampton would do itself more credit by dis- sociating its fight for the abolition of theological tests from the personal candidature of Mr. Bradlaugh. Mr. Bradlaugh is an ill-used man, but an ill-used man who has not done justice to his own position.
Previous page
