I said to Inspector Denning, 'I shall come again with force enough to
overcome it,' He said, 'When?' I said, 'Within a minute if I raise my
hand.'" He stood in Palace Yard, and there outside the gate was a vast
sea of heads, the men who had journeyed from all parts of England for
love of him, and in defence of the great right he represented of a
constituency to send to Parliament the man of its choice. Ah! he was
never greater than in that moment of outrage and of triumphant wrong;
with all the passion of a proud man surging within him, insulted by
physical violence, injured by the cruel wrenching of all his
muscles--so that for weeks his arms had to be swathed in bandages--he
was never greater than when he conquered his own wrath, crushed down
his own longing for battle, stirred to flame by the bodily struggle,
and the bodily injury, and with thousands waiting within sound of his
voice, longing to leap to his side, he gave the word to tell them to
meet him that evening away from the scene of conflict, and meanwhile
to disperse quietly, "no riot, no disorder." But how he suffered
mentally no words of mine may tell, and none can understand how it
wrung his heart who does not know how he reverenced the great
Parliament of England, how he honoured law, how he believed in justice
being done; it was the breaking down of his national ideals, of his
pride in his country, of his belief that faith would be kept with a
foe by English gentlemen, who with all their faults, he thought,
held honour and chivalry dear. "No man will sleep in gaol for me
to-night," he said to me that day; "no woman can blame me for her
husband killed or wounded, but--" A wave of agony swept over his face,
and from that fatal day Charles Bradlaugh was never the same man.
Some hold their ideals lightly, but his heart-strings were twined
round his; some care little for their country--he was an Englishman,
law-abiding, liberty-loving, to his heart's core, of the type of the
seventeenth-century patriot, holding England's honour dear. It was the
treachery that broke his heart; he had gone alone, believing in the
honour of his foes, ready to submit to expulsion, to imprisonment, and
it was the latter that he expected; but he never dreamed that, going
alone amongst his foes, they would use brutal and cowardly violence,
and shame every Parliamentary tradition by personal outrage on a
duly-elected member, outrage more worthy of a slum pot-house than of
the great C