history. Mr. Bagehot in his essay on Lord Althorp has said some really excellent things about the great Reform Bill-things any man is the better for remembering; but the thing I always remember is the reason he gives for Lord Althorp's leaving off hunting after his wife's death, a loss he felt with terrible keenness. "He gave up," says Mr. Bagehot, "not only society, which was no great trial, but also hunting, not because he believed it to be wrong, but because he did not think it seemly or suitable that a man after such a loss should be so very happy as he knew hunting would make him." No one but Bagehot could have given this sentence the peculiar twist it now possesses.

How admirable, too, is his well-known jest, "A man's mother is his misfortune; his wife is his fault"; yet in a philosopher and economist such merriment is dangerous. But humourparticularly when it is good-humour-though it may sometimes get in a man's way, is never a permanent obstacle to his fame.

My time is up, and I have said very little. My object was not to give a précis of Mr. Bagehot's books-that must have been dull-or to assign him his true place in the providential order of the world-that would have been impertinent-but merely to shake the tree, so that you might see for yourselves, as the fruit fell from it, what a splendid crop it bears.

To know Walter Bagehot through his books is one of the good things of life.

Q

Ma

CHARLES BRADLAUGH1

1905

R. BRADLAUGH was a noticeable man, and his Life, even though it appears in the unwelcome but familiar shape of two octavo volumes, is a noticeable book. It is useless to argue with biographers; they, at all events, are neither utilitarians nor opportunists, but idealists pure and simple. What is the good of reminding them, being so majestical, of Guizot's pertinent remark, "that if a book is unreadable it will not be read," or of the older saying, "A great book is a great evil"? for all such observations they simply put on one side as being, perhaps, true for others, but not for them. Had Mr. Bradlaugh's Life been just half the size it would have had, at least, twice as many readers.

The pity is all the greater because Mrs. Bonner has really performed a difficult task after a noble fashion and in a truly pious spirit. Her father's life was a melancholy one, and it became her duty as his biographer to break a silence on painful subjects about which he had preferred to say nothing. His reticence was a manly reticence; though a highly sensitive mortal, he preferred to put up with calumny rather than lay bare

1 Charles Bradlaugh: A Record of His Life and Work. By his daughter, Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner. Two vols. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1894.

family sorrows and shame. His daughter, though compelled to break this silence, has done so in a manner full of dignity and feeling. The ruffians who in times past slandered the moral character of Bradlaugh will not probably read his Life, nor, if they did, would they repent of their baseness. The willingness to believe everything evil of an adversary is incurable, springing as it does from a habit of mind. It was well said by Mr. Mill: "I have learned from experience that many false opinions may be exchanged for true ones, without in the least altering the habits of mind of which false opinions are the result." Now that Mr. Bradlaugh is dead, no purpose is served by repeating false accusations as to his treatment of his wife, or of his pious brother, or as to his disregard of family ties; but the next atheist who crops up must not expect any more generous treatment than Bradlaugh received from that particularly odious class of persons of whom it has been wittily said that so great is their zeal for religion, they have never time to say their prayers.

Mr. Bradlaugh will, I suppose, be hereafter described in the dictionaries of biography as "Freethinker and Politician." Of the politician there is here no need to speak. He was a Radical of the old-fashioned type. When he first stood for Northampton in 1868, his election address was made up of tempting dishes, which afterwards composed Mr. Chamberlain's famous but unauthorised programme of 1885, with minority representation thrown in. Unpopular thinkers who have been pelted with stones by Christians,

slightly the worse for liquor, are apt to think well of minorities. Mr. Bradlaugh's Radicalism had an individualistic flavour. He thought well of thrift, thereby incurring censure. Mr. Bradlaugh's politics are familiar enough. What about his freethinking? English freethinkers may be divided into two classes-those who have been educated and those who have had to educate themselves. The former class might apply to their own case the language once employed by Dr. Newman to describe himself and his brethren of the Oratory:

We have been nourished for the greater part of our lives in the bosom of the great schools and universities of Protestant England; we have been the foster-sons of the Edwards and Henries, the Wykehams and Wolseys, of whom Englishmen are wont to make so much; we have grown up amid hundreds of contemporaries, scattered at present all over the country in those special ranks of society which are the very walk of a member of the legislature.

These first-class freethinkers have an excellent time of it, and, to use a fashionable phrase, "do themselves very well indeed." They move freely in society; their books lie on every table; they hob-a-nob with Bishops; and when they come to die, their orthodox relations gather round them, and lay them in the earth" in the sure and certain hope"-so, at least, priestly lips are found willing to assert-" of the resurrection to eternal life

through our Lord Jesus Christ." And yet there

was not a dogma of the Christian faith in which they were in a position to profess their belief.

The freethinkers of the second class, poor fellows! have hitherto led very different lives. Their foster-parents have been poverty and hardship; their school education has usually terminated

at eleven; all their lives they have been desperately poor; alone, unaided, they have been left to fight the battle of a Free Press.

Richard Carlile, as honourable a man as most, and between whose religious opinions and (let us say) Lord Palmerston's there was probably no difference worth mentioning, spent nine out of the fifty-two years of his life in prison. AttorneyGenerals, and, indeed, every degree of prosecuting counsel have abused this kind of freethinker, not merely with professional impunity, but amidst popular applause. Judges, speaking with emotion, have exhibited the utmost horror of atheistical opinions, and have railed in good set terms at the wretch who has been dragged before them, and have then, at the rising of the court, proceeded to their club and played cards till dinner-time with a first-class freethinker for partner.

This is natural and easily accounted for, but we need not be surprised if, in the biographies of second-class freethinkers, bitterness is occasionally exhibited towards the well-to-do brethren who decline what Dr. Bentley, in his Boyle Lectures, called "the public odium and resentment of the magistrate.

Mr. Bradlaugh was a freethinker of the second class. His father was a solicitor's clerk on a salary which never exceeded £2 2s. a week; his mother had been a nursery-maid; and he himself was born in 1833 in Bacchus Walk, Hoxton. At seven he went to a national school, but at eleven his school education ended, and he became an office-boy. At fourteen he was a wharf-clerk and cashier to a coal-merchant. His parents were not much