eady 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, and men wondered how
the order would be enforced; but Charles Bradlaugh was not the man to
make a vulgar brawl, and the light touch on his shoulder was to him
the touch of an authority he admitted and to which he bowed. So he
gravely accompanied his small captor, and was lodged in the Clock
Tower of the House as prisoner until the House should further consider
what to do with him--the most awkward prisoner it had ever had, in
that in his person it was imprisoning the law.

In a special issue of the _National Reformer_, giving an account of
the Committee's work and of Mr. Bradlaugh's committal to the Clock
Tower, I find the following from my own pen: "The Tory party, beaten
at the polls by the nat