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 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 free-thinkers 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 free-thinkers 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.  Attorney-Generals, and, indeed, every degree of prosecuting counsel have abused this kind of free-thinker, 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 free-thinker 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.’