wanting in chivalry, because, while I can answer for myself and am able to answer for myself, nothing justified the introduction of any other name beside my own to make prejudice against me,” brought irrepressible cheers.  His appeal was wholly to the law.  “I have not yet used—­I trust no passion may tempt me into using—­any words that would seem to savour of even a desire to enter into conflict with this House.  I have always taught, preached, and believed the supremacy of Parliament, and it is not because for a moment the judgment of one Chamber of Parliament should be hostile to me that I am going to deny the ideas I have always held; but I submit that one Chamber of Parliament—­even its grandest Chamber, as I have always held this to be—­had no right to override the law.  The law gives me the right to sign that roll, to take and subscribe the oath, and to take my seat there [with a gesture towards the benches].  I admit that the moment I am in the House, without any reason but your own good will, you can send me away.  That is your right.  You have full control over your members.  But you cannot send me away until I have been heard in my place, not a suppliant as I am now, but with the rightful audience that each member has always had....  I am ready to admit, if you please, for the sake of argument, that every opinion I hold is wrong and deserves punishment.  Let the law punish it.  If you say the law cannot, then you admit that you have no right, and I appeal to public opinion against the iniquity of a decision which overrides the law and denies me justice.  I beg your pardon, sir, and that of the House too, if in this warmth there seems to lack respect for its dignity.  And as I shall have, if your decision be against me, to come to that table when your decision is given, I beg you, before the step is taken in which we may both lose our dignity—­mine is not much, but yours is that of the Commons of England—­I beg you, before the gauntlet is fatally thrown, I beg you, not in any sort of menace, not in any sort of boast, but as one man against six hundred, to give me that justice which on the other side of this hall the judges would give me, were I pleading there before them.”

But no eloquence, no plea for justice, could stay the tide of Tory and religious bigotry, and the House voted that he should not be allowed to take the oath.  Summoned to the table to hear the decision communicated by the Speaker, he answered that decision with the words firmly spoken:  “I respectfully refuse to obey the order of the House, because that order was against the law.”  The Speaker appealed to the House for direction, and on a division—­during which the Speaker and Charles Bradlaugh were left together in the chamber—­the House ordered the enforcement of Mr. Bradlaugh’s withdrawal.  Once more the order is given, once more the refusal made, and then the Serjeant-at-Arms was bidden to remove him.  Strange was the scene as little Captain Cosset walked up to the member of Herculean proportions,