religion.

--OLIVER CROMWELL.

I

One discordant refrain rang hoarsely throughout the five years of this
administration, and its first notes were heard even before Mr. Gladstone
had taken his seat. It drew him into a controversy that was probably more
distasteful to him than any other of the myriad contentions, small and
great, with which his life was encumbered. Whether or not he threaded his
way with his usual skill through a labyrinth of parliamentary tactics
incomparably intricate, experts may dispute, but in an ordeal beyond the
region of tactics he never swerved from the path alike of liberty and
common-sense. It was a question of exacting the oath of allegiance before
a member could take his seat.

Mr. Bradlaugh, the new member for Northampton, who now forced the question
forward, as O'Connell had forced forward the civil equality of catholics,
and Rothschild and others the civil equality of Jews, was a free-thinker
of a daring and defiant type. Blank negation could go no further. He had
abundant and genuine public spirit, and a strong love of truth according
to his own lights, and he was both a brave and a disinterested man. This
hard-grit secularism of his was not the worst of his offences in the view
of the new majority and their constituents. He had published an
impeachment of the House of Brunswick, which few members of parliament had
ever heard of or looked at. But even abstract republicanism was not the
worst. What placed him at extreme disadvantage in fighting the battle in
which he was now engaged, was his republication of a pamphlet by an
American doctor on that impracticable question of population, which though
too rigorously excluded from public discussion, confessedly lies among the
roots of most other social questions. For this he had some years before
been indicted in the courts, and had only escaped conviction and
punishment by a technicality. It was Mr. Bradlaugh's refusal to take the
oath in a court of justice that led to the law of 1869, enabling a witness
to affirm instead of swearing. He now carried the principle a step
further.

When the time came, the Speaker (April 29) received a letter from the
iconoclast, claiming to make an affirmation, instead of taking the oath of
allegiance.(3) He consulted his legal advisers, and they gave an opinion
strongly adverse to the claim. On this the Speaker wrote to Mr. Gladstone
and to Sir Stafford Northcote, stating his concurrence in th