All this miserable feeling, however, disappeared the moment I rose to my feet and looked at the faces before me.  No tremor of nervousness touched me from the first word to the last.  And a similar experience has been mine ever since.  I am still always nervous before a lecture, and feel miserable and ill-assured, but, once on my feet, I am at my ease, and not once on the platform after the lecture has commenced have I experienced the painful feeling of hesitancy and “fear of the sound of my own voice” of which I have often heard people speak.

The death of Mr. Charles Gilpin in September left vacant one of the seats for Northampton, and Mr. Bradlaugh at once announced his intention of again presenting himself to the constituency as a candidate.  He had at first stood for the borough in 1868, and had received 1086 votes; on February 5th, 1874, he received 1653 votes, and of these 1060 were plumpers; the other candidates were Messrs. Merewether, Phipps, Gilpin, and Lord Henley; Mr. Merewether had 12 plumpers; Mr. Phipps, 113; Mr. Gilpin, 64; Lord Henley, 21.  Thus signs were already seen of the compact and personally loyal following which was to win the seat for its chief in 1880, after twelve years of steady struggle.  In 1868, Mr. John Stuart Mill had strongly supported Mr. Bradlaugh’s candidature, and had sent a donation to his election fund.  Mr. Mill wrote in his Autobiography (pp. 311,312): 

“He had the support of the working classes; having heard him speak I knew him to be a man of ability, and he had proved that he was the reverse of a demagogue by placing himself in strong opposition to the prevailing opinion of the Democratic party on two such important subjects as Malthusianism. and Personal Representation.  Men of this sort, who, while sharing the democratic feelings of the working classes, judge political questions for themselves, and have courage to assert their individual convictions against popular opposition, were needed, as it seemed to me, in Parliament; and I did not think that Mr. Bradlaugh’s anti-religious opinions (even though he had been intemperate in the expression of them) ought to exclude him.”

When the election was over, and after Mr. Mill had himself been beaten at Westminster, he wrote, referring to his donation:  “It was the right thing to do, and if the election were yet to take place, I would do it again”.  The election in February, 1874 took place while Mr. Bradlaugh was away in America, and this second one in the same year took place on the eve of his departure on another American lecturing tour.

I went down to Northampton to report electioneering incidents for the National Reformer, and spent some days there in the whirl of the struggle.  The Whig party was more bitter against Mr. Bradlaugh than was the Tory, and every weapon that could be forged out of slander and falsehood was used against him by “Liberals”, who employed their Christianity as an electioneering dodge to injure a