CHARLES BRADLAUGH[A]

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

Mr. 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 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 unauthorized programme of 1885, with minority representation thrown in.  Unpopular thinkers who have been pelted with stones by Christians, slightly the worse for liquor, are