Читать книгу The Life & Work of Charles Bradlaugh - J. M. Robertson - Страница 27

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"THE WORLD IS MY COUNTRY, TO DO GOOD IS MY RELIGION."

A demonstration was held in Hyde Park on Sunday afternoon, September 28th, 1862, for the purpose of expressing sympathy with Garibaldi, and protesting against the occupation of Rome by the French troops. The hour announced for the meeting was three o'clock, and by that time the Morning Advertiser estimated that there were between 12,000 and 15,000 persons present. The proceedings were, however, very badly managed; no steps whatever were taken for keeping order, and, indeed, by three o'clock none of the conveners of the meeting had put in an appearance, nor had any arrangements whatever been made for a platform for the speakers. Mr. Bradlaugh had been asked to speak, and was, as a matter of course, punctually upon the scene. He found a ready-made platform in a great heap about fourteen yards by nine, and rising three feet from the ground. About this heap, upon which he and a few others had posted themselves, the crowd gathered, and at length Mr. Bradlaugh, seeing no signs of the conveners, commenced to speak. He was soon stopped by interruptions of every kind, and to make things a little more regular, a chairman was appointed; but the chairman had hardly begun to address the people when he "was hurled with his friends from their seat of eminence by a movement which a few Irish roughs had organised in the rear of them, down amongst the crowd beneath. By remarkable dexterity, however, the chairman regained his place upon the mount."[82] His efforts to be heard were again unavailing, and the proceedings rapidly developed into a free fight.

"During one of the lulls in the fighting position of the affair," says the Morning Advertiser, "Mr. Bradlaugh proposed a resolution to the effect that the meeting was of opinion that Garibaldi was faithfully doing his duty when he fell at Aspromonte, and desired to express its admiration of the heroic fortitude he displayed in his hour of trial."

The resolution was seconded and supported amid general uproar,

"while it was confidently stated that in the course of the discussion of it, and during one of the encounters for the possession of the platform, an attempt was made to stab Mr. Bradlaugh."[83]

Thus an assemblage which should have done honour to Garibaldi as well as to England, for, as the Advertiser says, "it was composed of the élite of the working classes and a large portion of the middle class," was turned by the Irish Catholics into a fight and a panic calling for the interference of the police. It is little to be wondered at that when Mr. Bradlaugh was invited by the Working Men's Committee to attend and speak he hesitated to accept the invitation, feeling as he did that the conveners were not able to control the antagonism of the Irish Catholics which had already manifested itself at other meetings. "I have no wish," he afterwards said, "for immediate martyrdom, and considerably abbreviated my speech when I found that knives were used as arguments."

In the winter of 1862 Mr. Bradlaugh made a public appeal to the Freethinkers of Great Britain to raise money on behalf of the distressed Lancashire operatives. He begged them to "waste no time, but at once in your large workshops and in your social meetings levy a rate for the reduction of the Lancashire distress." Those who were Freethinkers amongst the destitute in Lancashire were of course relieved by the General Relief Committee, but naturally they were excluded from the various charitable undertakings carried out by committees belonging to different denominations. As the relief afforded by the General Committee and the Board of Guardians only averaged 1s. 8½d. per head weekly, it will be seen how greatly dependent the distressed were upon the extra help of these other committees. A touching little story of Christian charity versus principle in rags was taken by Mr. T. S. Oates, then Secretary to the Lancashire Secular Union Special Distress Fund, from the Rochdale Observer of Dec. 13th, and was, he said, a fair sample of what frequently happened. A benevolent lady belonging to Middleton, on making her usual charitable round, entered one day a house in Parkfield, where she found "poverty in its worst shape." The father of the family was in rags, and the lady told the man that if he would come to her house that evening she would give him other clothes. The man, of course, was overjoyed, but when he was told that after he had the clothes he would be expected to attend church, and if he did not do so the clothes were to be returned, his joy was considerably cooled down. Then it was said that

"after making her statement, the lady left to make further inquiries into the cases of distress, leaving the man of poverty to reflect on the offer made to him. After a short consideration he commenced looking at his unsightly apparel, and then muttered to himself: 'Yo mun poo me through a bit longer, owd friends; it'll do noan to pop mi conscience for a shute of cloas!'"

My father did not preach without practising, although to me it is marvellous how, with his own struggle for existence, he always found a way to help others in their struggles. But this winter it was especially hard: several times he was called away to the Continent, and several times his health broke down, until he was so ill that he had to give up editing his paper, and for some months was also obliged to give up lecturing. Nevertheless, he contrived to keep an engagement he had made to lecture for the Relief Fund in Manchester on Feb. 1, 1863, in which he paid the whole of his own expenses, and so was able to hand £10 over to the Treasurer. Later on in the year he was lecturing again on behalf of the same object.

Almost concurrently with his efforts to raise money for Lancashire, he was making eloquent appeals for funds to aid Poland against her oppressors, and when he had somewhat recovered his health he addressed meetings on behalf of the struggling Poles. He spoke at Plumstead, Deptford, and Cleveland Hall, at Birmingham and Sheffield, where the fire and passion of his speeches evoked the utmost enthusiasm; at Halifax, where people walked eight and ten miles in the drenching rain to hear him, and at other places the details of which are not recorded. "Viva la Polonia" was a cry which, twenty years ago, found "a sympathising echo from every freeman in Europe, from every honest heart in the civilised world;" and my father was behind none in the warmth of his sympathy, or in the activity he displayed to give it practical effect.

Neither, with all this public work, was he unmindful or ungrateful for kindnesses shown himself personally; and so he never forgot the debt he owed his early friend, Mr. Jones, who now in consequence of old age and infirmities was reduced to extreme poverty. In the November of this same year he gave the last of his annual lectures for the benefit of his staunch old friend. On this occasion, too, Mr. Bendall, the lessee of the Hall of Science, gave the use of the hall—as indeed he frequently did, often at considerable inconvenience to himself—and the proceeds of the lecture and subscriptions amounted to upwards of £8, of which the greater part served to pay the funeral expenses of the brave old man, who, contemporary with Thomas Paine, had played his part in the struggles for a free press, particularly in those which we associate with the names of men like Richard Carlile, Wooler, and Hone.

In March 1864 occurred the great inundation at Sheffield; along the valleys of the Loxley and the Don all was ruin and desolation. Whole rows of houses, mills, and bridges were carried away, and huge trees were torn up by the force of the rushing water. Many lives were lost, and those who escaped with life lost every atom they possessed save the garments in which they escaped. Many funds were started for the relief of those so suddenly made destitute, and Mr. Bradlaugh was not slow in offering his help. A Sheffield man, writing at the time, said that the quality of practical sympathy was one possessed by Mr. Bradlaugh "in a pre-eminent degree, and it is a trait in his character which will add lustre to his name, and form a rich gem in the wreath which shall adorn his memory long after he shall have laid his honoured head in the silent tomb. … His large, generous heart is never insensible to the sounds of human distress; and accordingly no sooner did he hear of the Sheffield catastrophe than he at once volunteered his services towards the relief of the sufferers."[84]

I have mentioned these cases with the idea of showing how wide and how ready were my father's sympathies. To give money help was no easy matter to him: he could not write a cheque and say, "Put my name down for this sum or for that;" he could not even give by denying himself some little luxury: every penny he gave had to be specially earned for that purpose, but notwithstanding this, real distress rarely appealed to him in vain.[85]

Unable to do so much provincial lecturing in consequence of the demands made upon his time by his business, Mr. Bradlaugh was yet often to be found during the latter part of 1865 at the Hall of Science, City Road; but in the early part of 1866 he was away in Italy so much, sometimes for weeks together, that he could do very little lecturing. The proceeds of these winter lectures at the old Hall of Science were to go to the Hall of Science Company, which he was then actively projecting. The lease of the City Road Hall expired early in 1866, and the renewal had been refused. It was proposed to lease or purchase a suitable building, or a site of land on which to build a lecture-hall and rooms for classes for secular instruction, etc. To aid in providing funds for this purpose, it was Mr. Bradlaugh's desire to purchase one hundred shares out of the proceeds of his lectures, and to that end he devoted the whole of his profits on each occasion that he lectured at the Hall of Science.