TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE BRADLAUGH SETTLEMENT.
THE Government has done well in relation to Mr. Brad- laugh's case, though it has done well rather tardily. If it had taken its present action, instead of leaving Mr. Labouchere to be defeated last week in his motion for per- mitting Mr. Bradlaugh to take his seat, a good deal of con- fusion and of loss of time would have been avoided. Perhaps, however, it was inevitable that there should have been some delay before the Liberal party, as a whole, could disentangle the absurd and dangerous assumption that the House of Com- mons should, of its own arbitrary will, erect the present law in relation to Parliamentary oaths and affirmations into a test of abstract Theism, from the very different assumption under the disguise of which the Conservative case was presented to their minds,—that the House of Commons is not called upon to remove, for the benefit of a particular person of very objec- tionable opinions, an incidental obstacle which happens to be interposed, whether by accident, or through design on the part of former legislators, in the way of his taking his seat. These two assumptions are really completely different, and it is the former, and the former alone, which the House of Commons has now rejected, by a majority of fifty-four; while it was the latter, we believe, to which alone it intended to accede last week, and which it carried by a majority of forty-five. That a good deal of confusion should have prevailed between these two very distinct assumptions, and that while only intending, as we think, to accede to the latter, the House should have committed itself to the false step of accepting the former, is not very much to be wondered at. It takes time to realise clearly the pre- cise difference between doing strict justice and no more to one to whom we may regard it as immoral to be generous, and doing him a little injustice in order to prevent being generous. What the House of Commons could not persuade itself to sanction, was any act of special grace to Mr. Bradlaugh. And there, we think, the House of Commons was quite right. But when it rejected Mr. Labouchere's motion, it went really—though we do not believe that it intended to go—a good deal beyond this. It refused him legal justice, while only intending to re- fuse him any act of special grace. Mr. Gladstone never showed more powerfully his keen appreciation of the moral exigencies of a difficult occasion, than in the careful limitation of the scope of his argument on Thursday,—elaborately as Mr. Gorst had attempted, in his studiedly impertinent speech, by calling his conduct "disorderly," to irritate him into a warmer vein of partisanship. What Mr. Gladstone had to establish, and what, in our opinion, he did triumphantly establish, was that in all cases of Members claiming to take the oath or to affirm, the responsibility for what they do or omit to do lies with them and with the law which prescribes their conduct, and with the Judges who administer that law, not with the House of Com- mons, which is under the law, and has not even the right to interpret it. Mr. Bradlaugh, as Mr. Gladstone showed, had not " obtruded " his atheistic opinions on the House of Commons. He came up to the table and demanded the right to affirm. Whether or not he had that right, it is not for the House of Commons to decide. He would have affirmed, if he had affirmed,—or taken the oath, if he had taken the oath,—on his own responsibility ; and if in either case he had not obeyed the law, the proper authorities to decide that he had not obey( d the law are the Judges, whose business it is to deter- mine what the law is, and to enforce it. In denying Mr. Bradlaugh, or any other Member of Parliament, the right to take upon himself the responsibility of taking the oath or affirmation, subject to the subsequent judgment of the Courts upon his mode of fulfilling the law, the House of Commons denied him strict justice. In going any further, and taking on itself any responsibility for the due fulfilment of his legal obligations, the House would have gone beyond justice, and cast its shield over Mr. Bradlaugh. This, Mr. Gladstone did not intend the House to do, and of course, he was right. But he did ask it not to deny to an atheist his strict right only because he is an atheist; and so soon as the House realised the distinction between the two courses, it recognised that it had made a great blunder last week ; and then laid down for all future time the bare requirements of justice in any similar case. It may be that the Courts will unseat Mr. Bradlaugh, or it may be that they will declare his course perfectly legaL In either case, the House of Commons will be alike justified. It was not for them to declare, —against all sound reason,—that the law imposing the oath -
together with the law in certain cases dispensing with an oath, was intended to create a test of Theism, and to keep atheists out of the House of Commons; or even that, not having been intended to produce this result, it yet had produced it unawares. Nor was it for them to declare that such a purpose was quite foreign to the scope of the law. That is a question for a very different tribunal. What, at Mr. Gladstone's instance, the House of Commons has now declared, is solely this,—that the statute requiring Members, before taking part in the deliberations and votes of the House of Commons, to take the oath or affirma- tion of allegiance, is not one which the House has any power by its own resolutions to interpret or to alter, and that Mem- bers who, professing to discharge their legal obligations under it, really fail to do so, must be judged outside the House of Commons.
No feature in Thursday's debate was more remarkable than the attitude taken up by the Irish Roman Catholic party under Mr. Sullivan, and there is none which we more deeply regret. The assumptions of this gentleman were threefold,—that the oaths, or affirmations, now required of Members of Parliament. virtually amount to a test of Theism ; that the House of Commons, when invited, is bound to decide that they amount to this ; and that such a test is quite legitimate, so long. as the atheistic party in the kingdom is minute, but would not be legitimate or justifiable if ever the atheists multiplied in numbers, and became an appreciable section of her Majesty's subjects. We hardly know which of these assumptions is the more disputable, but we well know which is the more ignoble_ The first seems to us probably a mistake, but one in relation to which the House of Commons has no jurisdiction. The second is certainly a mistake, but an intellectual mistake only. The third strikes us as implying a very grave moral default in the appreciation of tests of belief and their operation. Mr. Sullivan said that "he would never vote. for excluding any appreciable section of the nation from fair representation. The suppression of minorities had been the corner-stone of tyranny in the history of Europe. Where was the class that was oppressed now ? It was nothing but an. individual. If there had been a class, it would have imitated other classes in petitioning for representation, for ten, or five,, or two years. They would have imitated other classes. for whom the House had waived tests. Whenever before had the House responded to the first knock of a class or of
an individual ? It would be well, when Nihilism in, Russia, Communism elsewhere, Atheism in many lands, were threatening thrones and constitutions, if they in England,— Jews, Protestants, and Catholics,—were to join hands in holy reverence round the shrine of religious belief, and act upon the grand old constitutional principle, Honour the King and worship God.'" Of course that assumes, what Mr. Sullivan has no right to assume, that the present law regulating oaths or affirmations is intended to act as a test of Theism ; it assumes also that the House of Commons has the power and right to say so, and to. administer it in that sense ; and further, it assumes that the principle of such a law is right so long as it keeps out no one who. represents a class, but would be wrong so soon as it kept out any one who represents a class. Can any assumption more perverse than this last be imagined It is well, says Mr. Sullivan, to keep. on our Statute-book an inoperative test in favour of Theism ; but so soon as such a test becomes operative, it ought to be struck out. Does he not see the impotence as well as the ignoble character of such a position ? If it is good to make a formal recognition of "the worship of God" the sine qua non of Parliamentary life, it must be good because it sifts out persons who do not worship God. And if it is right to admit those who do not worship God, as soon as any class wants them ad- mitted, what is the use of making them more popular than they otherwise would be, by that most effective of advertise- ments, an ineffectual martyrdom Either a theistic test is right, or wrong. We believe it to be wrong, though none dread Atheism more than we. But what is simply impossible is, that it should be right so long as there are no atheists to exclude, and wrong as soon as there are any. Mr. Sullivan, in his anxiety to steer a middle course between bigotry and religious liberty, has fallen between two stools, and become, what he very seldom is, both irrational and unjust. The debate was not so remarkable as that of last week, because it was wisely compressed within narrower limits. But the Roman Catholics who passed those limits did themselves less credit than any other section of the House.
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