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CHAPTER XXXI.
SIX MONTHS' IMPRISONMENT FOR ANSWERING
A QUESTION IN DEBATE.
(1842.)

NO.  It did not appear to me to matter.  In a general way I had an impression that imprisonment was unpleasant.  But that seemed no reason for not doing what was right.  The maxim that conscience was higher than consequence always appeared true to me.  Imprisonment was worse in my time than in the days of Leigh Hunt and Carlile.  Hunt had books, flowers, and company.  Pleasant visitors had access to Carlile, who spent hours in his society.  Except through the bars of a gate, I saw no friend.  I was imprisoned in a city far from those to whom I was best known, and few visits were possible.  The first and chief of the visitors was Richard Carlile, who came to tell me of his approval of my defence.  This, from the most intrepid defender of free speech of this century, tended to render me indifferent to the discomfort of my new residence.

    The visiting justice who most interested me was Mr. Bransby Cooper, brother of Sir Astley, the famous surgeon.  He formerly represented Gloucester in Parliament.  He was a man of great stature, great tenderness, great humanity, and, like Lord Byron, a man of tumultuous passion, with a voice like the Plymouth Sound.  Old women would waylay him on his road to the gaol.  He would brandish his stick at them, and drive them away with menaces and threats which could be heard across the city; but though they fled, they returned, for they knew that in the end he would give them all the money he had in his pocket.  He would tell me in his stentorian way, before the other prisoners, that I was "a fool for being an atheist," and end by saying, "I could not be one—I did not look like one, nor speak like one."  His son was chaplain of the gaol.  The old gentleman was very anxious for my conversion, and, had he brought it about, he would no doubt have generously given the credit to his boy.  It was therefore a kind of family speculation that I should be brought to a "state of grace."  Yet when my little daughter died, and her mother wished to bring the surviving one to me, Mr. Bransby Cooper kindly ordered that we should have the use of the magistrates' room for an interview, without the presence of an officer.  This unforeseen consideration—so delicate and trustful—inspired me with real respect for him, which has never departed from my mind.  I would have been converted if I could to gratify him.  One day the governor told me that Mr. Bransby Cooper had said before a meeting of magistrates, at which he had laid some representation of mine, that "he did not believe I could tell a lie," which was very generous in him, considering the prejudice he entertained towards my opinions.  This arose from a prisoner (one Upton) being found smoking.  He said he had brought the tobacco (I had given him) in with him after the trial—probably to save me from being made answerable.  It was some I had upon me in court.  This man, who was in the common room, was subject to fits, which he said tobacco mitigated.  So I gave him some.  It was a reflection upon the vigilance of the officer who received him if tobacco had escaped his notice.  To prevent Ogden, the officer, being wrongfully accused, I sent a note to the governor, saying it was I who had given the tobacco to Upton.  I owned it was a censurable violation of the prison rules, and stated that I should not demur to the consequences.  None ensued.  Probably the authorities were gratified that their officer was vindicated from the suspicion of laxity of vigilance.  The tobacco was given me at the time of my trial, and I was not searched after sentence.

    The Rev. Robert Cooper, the chaplain of the gaol, had the kindly nature, but none of the force of character of his father.  He was merely a regulation clergyman, who believed he had spiritual duties to discharge; but his piety was like cold water—it gave you the discomfort of dampness, and when dry again you were as you were before.  Still I retain respect for him.  He had none of that spite of piety I had hitherto experienced, and he was only disagreeable as a matter of official duty.  A prison is a place of organized brutality, and is so intended.  For a chaplain to speak of "divine love" there is not to understand his business.  A single humane act does more to spiritualize a man than a thousand exhortations without it.

    The Hon. Andrew Sayer was one of the visiting justices.  He was no soldier of the Cross.  He brought me "Paley's Natural Theology," and Leslie's "Short and Easy Method with the Deists," which he asked me to read.  This I promised to do; and that he might satisfy himself that the promise was fulfilled, I said he might examine me in the works afterwards— but he never did.  I wrote pamphlets upon their arguments ("Paley Refuted in his own Words," and "A Short and Easy Method with the Saints") to show that they had received careful attention.

    Another of the visiting justices was the Rev. S. Jones, an aged Wesleyan minister, who appeared deferential to his brother justices, placid in speech, and only ill-mannered professionally.  He would occasionally deliver a little lecture to me, before the other prisoners, on the belief I ought to entertain.  One day he quoted to me the ignorant remark of David, that "the fool hath said in his heart, There is no God."  This is what the fool never does say; the subject being beyond his capacity.  Certainly I had never said it in my heart or otherwise.  It had appeared to me to require infinite knowledge of the universe to affirm or deny that stupendous proposition.  "There," exclaimed Mr. Jones, "you see David says you are a fool."  Whereupon I answered "that I no more admired rudeness in the mouth of David than I did in the mouth of a magistrate."  Every one present heard me say it, and the Reverend Samuel looked amazed, was unable to reply, and never more referred to the subject.

    Before long the magistrates became a more serious trouble to me—probably their version was that I became a trouble to them.  They called upon me to wear the prison dress.  My answer was that "I did not wish to do it."   It was the dress of crime, and as I was no criminal it would be admitting it to wear the dress of crime by my own choice.  In gaol I knew official force must be supreme; therefore, I never said "I would not" do a thing, only that "I did not wish to do it."  Of course they said they should compel me.  In that case my reply was "it would be necessary to dress me every morning, as I might not like to put the dress on myself."  As it was never done, I fancy they thought the trouble of it might be too much for them, or it might be that they were in doubt whether Sir James Graham would sanction it.

    Another trouble soon arose.  When the prayer bell rang the first morning, all the prisoners filed out to chapel, but I remained.  Seeing my allotted place vacant, the chaplain sent the gaoler for me.  I said "it was incredible that the chaplain should send for me.  He knew my imprisonment was owing to my not properly believing in his ministration, and that my voluntary attendance at his chapel would be hypocrisy in me."  The gaoler said "he must carry out his instructions and take me there."  My reply was, "In that case you had better get assistance and carry me, as I do not think I should like to go.  Whether the chaplain's congregation will be edified by seeing a dissentient worshipper carried into chapel every morning it will be for him to decide."  Probably the gaoler concluded that this mode of bringing me to church needed special instructions—he went to seek them, and returned to me no more.

    That morning the chaplain sent for me to account to him for my non-appearance at church.  The explanation I gave him was that the service was mainly taken from the Prayer Book, which it seemed impiety to solemnly repeat as true when you knew it was not so.  The chaplain said, "But you know, Mr. Holyoake, that you are in prison, and must do as you are bidden."  "Yes, I am quite aware I am in prison.  I am under no illusion as to that.  Still it does not justify me in addressing to Heaven words not true.  If you will arrange that I may come into church at the time when you commence to preach, I am ready to do that.  Your sermon may have newness of thought instructive to me."  The chaplain was not displeased, but did not consent, and I never went to prayers or sermon.

    One day towards the end of my term the chaplain thought he ought to do something to change my views, and asked whether I would accompany him to the chapel and talk in a friendly way on the subject of spiritual conviction.  As to that I remarked "I had undergone one conviction, and felt no desire for another."  However, assenting, we went together to the chapel, where he entered the reading-desk, I remaining standing where he left me.  Seeing that, he civilly pointed to a front bench for me to be seated, and began a little oration to me, the sole member of his congregation in that gloomy chapel, where every seat had borne the impress of a thousand scoundrels.  When he came to the end he asked me "what I had to say."  Receiving no reply, he concluded he was making an impression, and began another short address, at the end of which he again asked me my opinion.  As his auditor still remained silent, he took heart again and commenced a third little oration.  A third time he appealed to me for some expression of opinion upon his arguments.  I then said, "I had no opinion to give.  He had spoken to me officially as chaplain, and addressed me as a prisoner, and in that character it was my lot to listen to him.  If he wished me to converse with him, he must treat me on a footing of equality.  That place was too cold for reasoning, "it being an inclement month.  He then asked me to accompany him else where.  Arriving at a warm cell, where blankets were aired, we had some friendly argument, and he asked me to accept a present of a Bible.  It was thought a great thing to give me a Bible.  As it had occasioned my imprisonment, it was bad taste to offer it to me; it was not calculated to excite my gratitude.  The copy he offered me was a little, squab, dumpling edition, published by the Society for the Diffusion of Christian Knowledge at 10d.  I remarked to the chaplain, "I should not like to carry a mean-looking little book like that.  It was not respectful to God to present His Word in that curmudgeon form; but I would accept a better-looking copy, with marginal references down the centre, such as might assist me in trying to reconcile what appeared to me its many contradictions."  So our interview ended, but the 7s. 6d. edition upon which I had fixed my mind never came to hand.

    The prisoners I found in the common room were, with one exception, ignorant, and were there for acts of violence, or minor thefts, or frauds.  In the day-time I kept a little school and taught them something.  One was a young, good-looking man, belonging to London, whom I thought well of.  When his term of imprisonment was up, I entrusted him with two volumes of Hume and Smollet's "History of England," which I had in numbers, to get bound for me, and deliver at the Oracle office in London, and I gave him money to pay for the binding.  My confidence was not successful, as he kept the money and sold the books.

    The chief prisoner was a Mr. Wall, who had been postmaster at Cheltenham, said to have been put in that office by the influence of a peer, for reasons relating to his birth.  He had opened letters and taken the money out.  One case was very shocking.  A servant-girl had saved her money up and sent it to a soldier in the army.  Never receiving any answer, she thought him unfaithful, and poisoned herself.  Receiving no communication, as she had promised him, the soldier thought she had deserted him, and shot himself.  This scoundrelly post master was pleasant-spoken, gentlemanly, and cultivated.  His criticisms of some things I wrote were instructive to me.  He was entirely pious, and punctual at prayer, but a knave at heart.

    My liberation occurred some time before Wall's, and he wrote to me shortly after, making in his letter some defamatory remarks upon the governor, and, thereby, implying that I shared the writer's views.  As the governor would read the letter, he might think that, despite my professions of respect for him when in his charge, I had used different language privately.  Captain Mason, however, wrote upon the letter himself saying that "he did not believe that Wall's expressions were warranted by any remarks of mine, as he had always found me honourable in my statements."  This was handsome in Captain Mason, and increased my regard for him.

    My prison companions, therefore, were not of an edifying or improving class; but there were other discomforts, different and far more disquieting, which will never depart from my mind.  Word was sent me that my child was ill, and then a letter came saying she was dead.  The governor considerately called me out into the yard, and gave it to me.  It was not till after my liberation that I knew the manner of her death.  The sole income of home was from subscriptions from friends in various parts of the country, supposed to average 10s.  a week; but it was not regular.  A few days before the fever took the child, her mother was carrying her through Bull Street, Birmingham, when she cried from hunger for a bun in a window.  There was no penny to buy it, and the frenzied mother slapped the child to quiet her.  She never forgave herself for doing that, and forty years later she oft repeated the last words of the child on the night of her death, when she exclaimed that "I was coming to see her"—repeated them in the tones of the child which went into the mother's heart for evermore.

 
CHAPTER XXXII.
OTHER TROUBLES IN PRISON.
(1842-3.)

OWING to a Chartist prisoner having died in a neighbouring gaol from disease contracted through bad air, bad diet, and damp, as poor Holbery of Sheffield had done, a Commission was sent down by the Government to take evidence.  Dr. Blissett Hawkins, with his sharp look and scrutinizing eyes, was at the head of it.  The Commissioners came round the cells and asked me, among others, whether I had any complaint to make.  I said "Yes."  One night, between 9 and 10 o'clock, the gaoler came into my cell and told me to dress, as the Commissioners wished to see me.  On arriving before them, and observing Captain Mason and the surgeon were present, I held my peace.  Reminded by Dr. Hawkins that they sent for me, understanding I had a complaint to make, I explained they could not expect to obtain evidence from prisoners in the presence of the governor, since they would remain in the power of those who might resent afterwards what a prisoner had said; even the surgeon had many ways of retaliation.  The governor had behaved to me with courtesy and humanity.  He was always a gentleman, and if he had had to hang me he would have apologized for the inconvenience to which he was putting me and have had the bolt withdrawn while I was saying "Don't mention it."   It was not that I had any distrust of the governor, but I wished to show the Commissioners that they were not going the way to collect prison facts for an honest report.  Dr. Hawkins said, "Captain Mason and the surgeon had better leave."  Observing me still silent, Dr. Hawkins asked the cause.  I answered that the Commissioners ought to give a prisoner a guarantee that no personal consequences should ensue to him after they had left, as he would still remain in the hands of the authorities without protection, if they took offence at any allegation he made.  Dr. Hawkins assured me that that should not occur.

    Then I explained that in that gaol the health of prisoners was in the hands of a kind-hearted but timorous surgeon, who owed his appointment to the magistrates, and had not the resolution or independence to act upon his own judgment when it conflicted with their political, theological, or personal prejudices against prisoners.  They explained to me that if a surgeon failed in his duty he was responsible.  I answered that was so, but a prisoner must die before the responsibility could be brought home to the surgeon, and that was very grave consolation.  They seemed amused at my unconscious use of the word "grave," for they remembered that it was owing to the recent death of a prisoner that they were sent down to inquire into the cause of it.  I added that county magistrates did not seem very bright, and had no clear idea of their duties.  The Commissioner did not encourage me in these remarks, but they were made before they could stop me.  I said some of the cells were filthy and some beds alive with vermin.  No prisoner expected tenderness, but cleanliness ought to exist, together with security for life.  The dependent position of the doctor, however, afforded none, unless a prisoner was a criminal, then the authorities had no prejudice against him.  Neither could they get at the truth they were sent to inquire into and make an honest report to the Crown, unless they caused it to be understood that prisoners who gave them information would be protected.  They promised me again that no resentment should follow; nor did it.  The governor was civil as heretofore, and the doctor kindly gave me a mutton-chop in my broth.  Though inclined to vegetarianism I was glad of that.

    The Commission reported finally that Gloucester Gaol lay low, was unhealthy, and recommended that the gaol in which the Chartist died should be superseded.  No doubt the poor Chartist was killed in it, all according to law, as poor Holbery was, and as Ernest Jones was nearly killed.  No Irish prisoner has run greater risks.  Thomas Cooper would have fared no better save for his wondrous personal resistance.  They thought they had driven him mad before the authorities relaxed their restrictions.  Under the rules of the gaol, the authorities could have killed me had I resisted indignity as Mr. O'Brien and Mr. Mandeville did, and would have run me very near to it had not Sir James Graham and Mr. Roebuck been my friends.

    The quality of mind of the visiting justices who had me in charge may be seen in this instance.  At the Christmas, which occurred during my imprisonment, it came to their knowledge that a poor labourer had got himself under a short sentence, in order to be in gaol on Christmas Day; for on that "day of glad tidings" it was the kindly custom to mark it to the desolate prisoners by a treacle dumpling, with a few raisins in it.  It was not much of a taste of the "glad tidings," but it gave pleasure; to some believing hearts among the prisoners it was comfort, and it gave the only sign, all the year round, that they lived in a Christian land.  Instead of being struck with compassion that there should be an honest labourer, so hopeless of tasting a bit of Christmas pudding as to get himself incarcerated for a week for that transient pleasure, the magistrates, three clergymen among them (the Rev. and Hon.  Andrew Sayer, Rev. Dr. Newell, Rev. Samuel Jones, the chaplain concurring), abolished Christmas pudding on Christmas Day for all the prisoners there, evermore.  Thus these clergymen taught the prisoners to rejoice in the "glad tidings of great joy" brought by Christ.  Because one poor workman got into prison against Christmas pudding day, they reasoned from that single instance that all the workmen of Gloucester would, if they knew it, get into gaol from the same cause!  It is said to be a sign of the ignorance of the people that they reason from a single instance, instead of from a majority of similar instances.  But here were magistrates, educated at college, as ignorant as the uninstructed rabble, and more cruel.

    After a time, Sir James Graham, in answer to a memorial of mine, sent word for me to be allowed to sit up at night until nine o'clock.  It was a great waste of time for me to be shut up in darkness from four o'clock in winter-time until eight o'clock next morning, sixteen hours.  I contrived some mitigation by secreting the cover of a book, sticking pins in the sides at even distances, and running a thread across from side to side.  It resembled the page of a ruled copy-book—save that the lines were elastic.  By running a sheet of paper under the threads I could write with a pencil in the dark, between the lines.  In this way I prepared articles for the Oracle of Reason, and got them conveyed as opportunity offered to the post.  This night work implied sitting up in bed, and against this was the cold.  For two months I was never warm.  Besides, I was deteriorating in other ways.  My pillow was of coarse sacking stuffed with cocoa-nut fibre, so hard that it flattened and elongated my ears beyond the length which my adversaries expected to find in a person of my way of thinking.

    So it was welcome news when Sir James Graham's order came.  But Sir James had never been a prisoner (all Home Secretaries ought to be imprisoned before taking office), and did not know that the magistrates would construe every instruction against the prisoner.  As he did not say he intended to grant the continuance of fire and light, they construed his kindly interference to mean permission to sit up in cold and darkness.  Then I began to regret my disbelief in future perdition, as there was no adequate place hereafter to which these magistrates could go.  In this respect imprisonment did succeed in shaking my faith a little.

    One night, many years afterwards, in the smoking-room of the House of Commons, I mentioned to Sir Wilfrid Lawson that I cherished grateful memories of his uncle for his generous interference on two occasions on my behalf when I was a prisoner, with no other friend in authority save himself.  At another time Sir Wilfrid told me that it was a consolation to Sir James Graham to hear what I had said, "for though he had served his country for many years, and not unsuccessfully, he feared he would only be remembered as the Home Secretary who opened Mazzini's letters."  Lord Aberdeen denied that the contents of the letters were communicated to the Austrian Government.  Unfortunately, you do not always know when a minister speaks the truth.  It is their custom to give a technical answer which is beside the point of the inquiry.  The letter might be shown to the Austrian minister without a copy being officially communicated to him.  Anyhow, the brothers Bandiera, of noble family, were captured and shot in consequence of Mazzini's letters being opened.  If Sir James did communicate a letter he had opened to a foreign power, he did no more than all Home Secretaries had done before, and he was no worse than his predecessors.  All Home Secretaries since have opened letters, and do so still.  There is a popular understanding that an English Home Secretary shall not act as a spy for foreign governments.  But I remember no assurance being given that they shall never so act.  The intention of Liberals in 1844 was not to hold up Sir James Graham as worse than other Home Secretaries, but to stop the system which prevailed in his office when he came to it.  It is conceivable that he thought foreign ministers were as just-minded as he was, and would use information for precaution, and not for murder.  Anyhow, there has been no Home Secretary in my time who has shown the same regard for the self-respect and rights of unpopular prisoners as Sir James Graham showed towards me.

    We had few friends in those days, but there was one whom those of us who went out in the forlorn hope never forget, and to whom I gratefully inscribed my "History of the Last Trial by Jury for Atheism":

 
CHAPTER XXXIII.
WHAT HAPPENED AFTER IMPRISONMENT.
(1843-80.)

AFTER the affair with Mr. Justice Erskine, I could not retire from public advocacy.  I should have been thought a coward; my treatment would have been tried on others; many would have been discouraged if I had shown signs of giving way, and the enemies of free opinion would have triumphed and grown insolent.  During my imprisonment it was suggested to me by the chaplain that I might do better by accepting for myself a situation as master of a school in which my wife could be appointed mistress, and this could be arranged if I would desist from the advocacy on which I had embarked.  That doleful ending was not to my mind.  It was also suggested to me that I might free myself by petition and submission.  Not only would I not do it, but I gave notice to my friends that I should count it as an outrage if any one did it in my name, or on my behalf.  My wife would have resented it had I done it on her account.  So when I was free I took the warpath again. 

    To compare a small affair with great ones, had I been, like Savonarola or Bruno, subjected to torture and fire, I know not how I should have behaved, for I have no taste for rack or torch.  But such trouble as can now befall a wilful person—imprisonment, darkness, privation, cold, and insult—is supportable, though death may come that way.

    Wherever I was advertised to lecture, some enthusiasts who engaged me described me as one who had been delivered by the spiritual police to the "secular arm."  I never objected to this, because it was defiance—but it was not profit.  As soon as I could get means of travelling after my liberation, I went down to Cheltenham and repeated the words which led to my sojourn at Gloucester, on the ground that I had been called upon to pay a certain price for free speech, and that, as I had paid the price, I had purchased the right.  This was not good law, but it was good defiance, and that was what I meant.

    One effect of the reputation of having been imprisoned appeared in 1846 where it was least to be expected.  Mr. William Ellis, a great friend and admirer of Mr. J. S. Mill, founded some secular schools in London, and defrayed their expenses himself.  One was intended for the National Hall, Holborn.  Mr. William Lovett was secretary of the proposed school, as he was of the committee of the National Hall.  He had been imprisoned himself two years in Warwick Gaol for political reasons.  Francis Place was one of the consulting authorities of the intended school.  I offered myself for the office of teacher with his consent.  Mr. Lovett, the secretary, to whom I wrote upon the subject, never replied to any communication I made to him.  When, after some months, the matter was brought to his notice, he said "he understood Mr. Place would reply to my letters."  But Mr. Place had never received them.  Mr. C. D. Collet and Mr. Serjeant Parry, members of the committee, complained of Mr. Lovett's conduct.  Mr. Lovett was employed by Mr. Ellis to conduct one of his secular schools, and he had an income from Mr. Ellis as long as he lived.  But so strong was his prejudice against me, who had been imprisoned for heresy, that he who had been incarcerated for sedition was unable to be civil to me.  I told him that, if it should appear to the promoters of the school that my being a teacher of it would be detrimental, I should myself object to my own appointment.  Heresy in theology proved a much more serious thing than heresy in politics; and that avenue of employment was closed.

    At one time a publisher who had known me as a social advocate conceded me employment in his house.  This being a friendly act, my first thought was what would happen to him if I went.  I thought in the interests of my employer that I should always be called by a writing name I had elsewhere used, to neutralize my identity where, if obtruded, the consequence would fall upon others.  My own name would be sure to incite inquiries.

    Mr. Horace Greeley, the founder of the New York Tribune, gave to an Irish journalist of mark in New York (Thomas Ainge Devyr, before named) a letter of introduction to me.  I granted him writing quarters in my publishing house in Fleet Street, and was at willing trouble to be of service to him.  On his return to America he wrote a singular paper, setting forth the causes in operation, which would lead to war before long on the question of slavery.  This was three years before the war broke out, and when Devyr's calculations were published neither the journalists of England nor those of America believed that war was coming.  When it came, three years later, I put this prediction in the hands of several members of Parliament in this country, as an instance of the political foresight of my friend.  The paper consisted of several columns.  It happened that I never read more than two, and their purport being striking, I lent the paper to valued friends, thinking the whole of it was of the nature of the part I had read.  Some years after, curiosity led me to peruse the whole, when I found that it contained indignant reproaches of my friend, Horace Greeley, for having given a letter of introduction to me, as, I being a person well known to hold theological opinions not at all in request, his acquaintance with me was a disadvantage to him; and more to the same uncomplimentary effect.  Thus had I been circulating among my public friends this disparaging account of myself.  My object was to exalt the reputation of my visitor for political sagacity; all the while I was doing my best to destroy any social reputation I might have.  This was another instance in which my residence at Gloucester gave me a profitless distinction; it lent to me a luminosity of a sulphurous kind, which caused me to be distinguished in a crowd.

    Some years later Mr. Devyr wrote to me soliciting some friendly offices at my hands, which I had the pleasure to perform, as I had great regard for him on account of perilous services he had rendered to Ireland.  But I now took the precaution of reading all through his communications before they passed from my hands.  When I visited New York some twenty years later, my ambiguous visitor at Fleet Street appeared on a public platform at Cooper Union, and claimed to bear his testimony in my honour for the advantage to him of the courtesy and kindness I had shown him when he was a stranger in London.  It was quite an unexpected incident.  He had become grateful for what he had been ungrateful.

    Sometimes, when engaged to deliver co-operative lectures, an excited grocer would write a letter to a paper in the town asking if I was not the same person who had given trouble to the saints on a certain occasion.  My friends who engaged me did not care for this, but feared it might harm the society—I was engaged no more.  This sort of thing only excites curiosity now, and increases an audience.  It excited terror then.

    The incident to be related in the chapter on W. E. Forster would never have occurred but for my heretical reputation; nor would the proposal of certain of the Oddfellows to deprive me of the prizes awarded to me have been made.  It was brought against the Society for Repealing the Taxes on Knowledge that I reported in the Reasoner proceedings of Mr. Collet, the secretary, Mr. Serle, who wrote under the name of "Caustic" in the Weekly Dispatch, made this charge.  That most Radical paper was against the Repeal.

    When Garibaldi was at Brooke House, I drove nine miles across the Isle of Wight to a telegraph station, that information might reach a London daily, at the request of their reporter, who could not get the news.  I paid the expense of the telegrams as well as the charge for the vehicle.  Telegrams making a mere paragraph were several shillings then.  I was refused any payment at the office, though my communication was used.  It was not prudent of me to complain, as my secular wilfulness was remembered and marred my eligibility for engagements.  Sometimes I contributed to papers without my work being recognized or paid for, or when paid for I was often precluded from owning to my own articles if I was asked the question, lest the knowledge should damage the paper.  In some instances, I should certainly have been on the staff of public journals but for my heretical disqualification.  The editor was not afraid, but he was afraid lest other people should be afraid.  The only instance to the contrary in those days was the proprietor of the Newcastle Chronicle, who was never afraid of anything or anybody, so far as I could discover.  [16]

    Sometimes my books were not reviewed because it was not to the editor's interest to mention my name; sometimes, as in the Quarterly Review, they were reviewed without my name as author; six other books were reviewed at the same time, and as the omission of my name looked singular, the editor struck out their names, and seven books without authors were duly reviewed.  Sometimes my books were reprinted, as in Paisley, without the name of the writer; sometimes, as in America, "Public Speaking and Debate" was reprinted with the name of a minister on the title-page, and a preface by the reverend gentleman, that the reader might have instruction without the danger of knowing to whom he owed it.  Many hours' amusement all this consideration afforded me; and made me recall the lines

    When I first went out in defence of reason and freedom as against dogma and restriction, experience taught me that I was shutting myself out from opportunities of advantage open to others, and I felt neither surprise nor regret when the evil days came.  As I have said already, imprisonment was never to my taste.  I never wished it: I never sought it—I never feared it.  I have exposed myself to it many times since, and would do it again now for a just principle; but no man will persuade me that persecution is an advantage to any cause or any person.  But it is a great dignity when incurred from a sense of duty or resistance to dishonour.  I neither provoked persecution nor shrank from it.  Though no one else desired freedom, it is enough for me that I desire it; I would maintain the conflict for it as best I could, though no one else cared about it; and, as I chose to make the purchase, I do not higgle about the price.  Tyranny has its soldiers; and why not freedom?  While thousands daily perish at the shrine of vice, of vanity, and of passion, what is the pain of a sacrifice now and then for a public principle?

    Innovation in theology is more serious than innovation in politics.  Politicians are always dealing with new facts; and affairs of years ago are soon swept out of memory by the current of new interests.  Political parties unpopular a few years ago may be in ascendency to-day, and sedition in the past becomes patriotism in the present.  But in ecclesiasticism all is different.  The Church forgets no offence against it, and rarely forgives it.  The part taken in Liberal policy by the great statesmen of France and England at the end of the last century none but historical students remember; but every fool in the streets, in every town and village, knows that Voltaire and Paine were against the priests.  Theology is always in power.  The party of reason is always in a minority, and a prisoner for heresy is always under condemnation, though his sentence may have long since expired.  Indeed, instead of ceasing at his death, it increases.  Charges he might answer if living no one answers for him, since he would himself be suspected who did so.

    Experience convinced me of one thing.  A man need not, like Crusoe, betake himself to the peril of the sea to fall upon a desert island.  Any one of strong individual views soon finds himself upon one at home.  Insight of things not perceived by your fellows and which they do not wish to see, but which you insist upon making known, create a desert island around you before you are aware of it, and you find yourself dwelling with far-off neighbours.  Unknown truth is to the ignorant an unknown terror—a terror because the nature of the new idea is unknown in its relations to the familiar.  The propagandist is regarded as the Brahmin regarded the microscope not as making evident living creatures before unperceived, but as creating the new objects revealed.  When new truth is regarded as a heresy, he who maintains it may be glad if his fate is to be only deserted, and not driven out, like the passenger in a plague ship, to perish in the loneliness of the ocean.  But too much is not to be made of the disadvantages of taking sides.  All opinion has its penalties.  Nor would those I have cited be worth recounting, except to show those who seek truth or usefulness, that inconvenience may arise; and that being forewarned, they may not be discouraged by surprise, and look back.

 
CHAPTER XXXIV.
A REMARKABLE COUNSELLOR OF PROPAGANDISTS.
(1843-55.)

IN my time I have known many generous lawyers, but no one who took so wide an interest in freedom of opinion, in political and social progress, or who was the counsellor of so many publicists, who as the writer of this chapter did, by opinionative wilfulness got themselves into unforeseen trouble.

    Mr. William Henry Ashurst was an eminent City solicitor of London.  He was a colleague of Sir Rowland Hill, and was counted the second person to whom the success of the Penny Postage was due.  He was the trusted legal adviser of Robert Owen.  He held Owen's principle—that human circumstance had a controlling influence on human action.  When called upon professionally to decide whether a servant guilty of defalcation should be prosecuted, he would cause inquiry to be made as to whether poverty, or the pressure of a family beyond means of support, or strong temptation had overcome natural honesty—showing that the exercise of mercy might afford an opportunity for recovering character.  Thus he saved many from transportation and ruin.  Where a defaulter was without moral principle, he left him to the law.  Thus an intelligent principle of compassion, not based on sentiment or on Biblical authority, but upon human considerations, rescued many who would otherwise have been lost.

    Under the name of "Edward Search," Mr. Ashurst was a frequent writer in the Boston Liberator of Lloyd Garrison, assisting him by counsel, pen, and purse in the battle for negro freedom.  Publicists in England and in other nations brought into conflict with the law, in endeavours to extend the limits of freedom in politics or opinion, often found their way to Mr. Ashurst, whose advice and aid were always at their command.  Thus, when my trial in Gloucester befell me, I was introduced to him, and he was my friend all his days.  Mr. John Morris, who succeeded to the business, and Mr. Shaen, were trained in Mr. Ashurst's office, both became distinguished solicitors, and alike rendered the same generous counsel to propagandists who had trouble with authority.  Mr. Ashurst's son, William Henry, afterwards solicitor to the Post Office, followed in the discerning and merciful steps of his father.  Mr. Ashurst had in his own mind the intellectual freedom he defended for others.  He believed in the wise maxim of Lucretia Mott, whom he greatly esteemed—"Truth for Authority, not Authority for Truth."

    Believing that social ideas would one day largely occupy the attention of society, Mr. Ashurst bought, in 1849, a paper entitled The Spirit of the Age, which had been projected by Robert Buchanan, father of the present poet.  The paper was about to cease, and the purchase money given for it was of the nature of a gift in acknowledgment of services the conductors had otherwise rendered to social progress.  For three months they were retained upon the paper, out of consideration to them, with power to have articles of their own inserted.  I received the appointment of editor.  My advice was in favour of paying the former conductors the salaries accorded them, and commencing the paper on the new lines of studious "fairness towards the middle and the industrious class," whom it was designed to influence or benefit.  Mazzini had consented to write; so had one who afterwards became a Cabinet Minister, two members of the French Provisional Government, and others whose names would have given distinction to the paper, which was intended to be what The Leader afterwards was.

    In the meantime, the retained contributors, who had acquired class anger in many social conflicts, wrote in hostility to the dispassionate views of the new proprietor.  In the last number over which they could exercise the right of insertion, they announced a new paper to be started by themselves.  As public support was then very limited, there was little prospect of establishing The Spirit of the Age, with a rival journal arising as it were out of itself.  I therefore advised Mr. Ashurst that he would lose all further money which he intended to devote to the enterprise, and that he had better consider the £600 he had already expended as wholly lost.  Thus I terminated my own appointment more valued by me than any other which had then been accorded me.

    Mr. Ashurst wrote a final notice which was expressed with force and dignity, saying, "It is due to our readers to inform them that with this number The Spirit of the Age ceases.  He who took the paper and defrayed its entire liabilities has since sustained it, to see whether an addition of quantity, more care in its superintendence, and a well considered devotion to the interests of those whose views it was intended to advance, would obtain for it that support which would give it an independent existence.  The experiment would have been continued longer, money not being essentially important; but it appears that, unless the paper is conducted in the same tone and style under which it arrived at death's door, it will not be satisfactory to those who had originally issued it, and who had sought our aid to prevent its termination.  Our own views are that just ends should be sought, and ought to be sought by peaceable means.  All subscribers who have paid in advance for copies will have returned to them the residue due to them."

    The discontinuance of this journal was an advantage to those who had projected a rival paper, as it left the field clear for them.  They, however, regarded the advice I had given which led to the cessation of The Spirit of the Age as implied censure upon them, which indeed it was.  Thus, without deserving it, I incurred their dislike, and the hostility and disparagement by the principal of them, Mr. Lloyd Jones, were protracted through thirty-four years.

    Mr. Ashurst was a shrewd judge of efficiency.  To the writer of the foreign summary of The Spirit of the Age, in which Mr. Ashurst observed vacancies where facts were wanting, he said, "How do you write your summary—from notes?" The reply was, "Oh no, I do not need to do that.  I write from memory of the week's news."  Mr. Ashurst answered, "The plan has the advantage of saving you the remorse of knowing what you omit."

    While I was responsible for The Spirit of the Age, I devised a tabular slip of paper on which appeared the number printed, the number sold, the sum received for papers, the sum received for advertisements, cost of paper, weekly average of rent, taxes, and office expenses, the amount paid for salaries and contributions; total outlay and total loss or gain.  This statement I delivered every Saturday to Mr. Ashurst, that he might have at a glance true knowledge of the fortunes of his enterprise.  It was a rule in my mind to do what was just, and to take care that others to whom I was answerable saw that I did it, and had not the trouble of inquiring for their own satisfaction.  This seemed to me to be due towards those who trusted me.

    In many ways I was indebted to Mr. Ashurst's friendship.  Desiring to attend lectures at the London University, impossible to me with my means, he made me a loan of £50 to enable me to do it.  A year or two afterwards I repaid him by instalments which seemed unexpected to him, as though his experience had not lain much in that way.  He was pleased, however, more for my sake than his own.  There was no other idea in my mind than that of repaying him.  It was a greater gratification to return the loan than to receive it.  Upon paying him the last amount he sent me to his cashier, Mr. Mayer, to get the repayment recorded in his ledger, lest it might appear hereafter as still due.  This really happened.  Mr. Mayer deferred and neglected to make the entry, and after Mr. Ashurst's decease it was mentioned to me that the amount appeared as still owing.  The receipt given me by Mr. Ashurst I was then unable to find, and I was told not to trouble about it, as my word was sufficient.  Some years later the receipt turned up, and was sent to the family who had so handsomely accepted my word.  This was resented as amounting to distrust of their assurance.  That was not so.  Their word was the same to me as a new receipt, but it was simply following the rule I observed with Mr. Ashurst of making it clear on the first opportunity that the fact corresponded with my word.

    When the Leader newspaper company was being formed, a provisional meeting was held at the Whittington Club.  Mr. Ashurst, who took shares in the paper, attended the meeting.  Quite unforeseen by me, he said "he had come to meet the promoters for the purpose of saying that he understood that Mr. Holyoake was to be the manager of the paper.  He therefore wished to say that he had held a similar appointment under him, and had saved him a thousand pounds by his advice, when it was to his interest that he (Mr. Ashurst) should go on expending the money, and that Mr. Holyoake was the only person connected with the ink pot, with whom he had had relations, who had repaid him when he had taken a pecuniary interest in his affairs."

    This speech took me very much by surprise.  I can see now, writing forty years later, that I ought at once to have risen and thanked Mr. Ashurst for his generous tribute, of which I knew nothing beforehand.  That certainly is not "presence of mind" which occurs to you forty years after the event.  I was confused, and said nothing.  Mr. Thornton Hunt, with his quick kindness, saw the reason of my silence, and he and Mr. Lewes made acknowledgments for me in terms which placed me under obligations to them for their courtesy and confidence.  Thus it was not always a disadvantage to me to have done what I conceived to be right without considering whether it was for or against my interest to do it.

 
CHAPTER XXXV.
RICHARD CARLILE THE PUBLISHER.
(1843.)

OF two men who were for a time contemporaneous—both famous in a different way, both impassable in their opinions—one was English in everything, the other Scotch in everything —one was Richard Carlile, the other Thomas Carlyle.

    Richard Carlile was best known to me.  It was in 1841, on my first Sunday in London, that I first met him.  It was on one of the few days allowed me to prepare for my trial at Gloucester.  As I was passing Blackfriars Bridge at two o'clock in the afternoon, I saw approaching a short, thick-set gentleman, with piercing eyes and pleasant though resolute expression of countenance.  The beams of the sun, then fiercely descending, lent animation to his features.  The friend with me stopped and introduced me to Richard Carlile.  He greeted me with many friendly words of commendation, which I valued as coming from a veteran prisoner for opinion to one who had scarcely entered the ranks.  He told me he had to speak that night at the Hall of Science in the City Road, a building constructed in a waggon yard, near the Bunhill Fields Cemetery.  The hall was put up by Mr. Mordan, the well-known inventor, of the gold pen, in order that Rowland Detrosier might speak there.  Carlile said he was to lecture upon "The New Scientific Interpretation of the Scripture," and expressed a wish that I should take part in the discussion thereon—which I did, as is related in the chapter on the "Origin of Secularism."

    It was an additional attraction to me to go to the Hall of Science, as I should see the place in which Detrosier lectured, and speak myself there.  Rowland Detrosier was dead then.  He was a foundling, bearing his mother's French name, and was educated in a Manchester Benevolent Vegetarian Institution, where he came to be a kind of preacher, and astonished, not only his congregation, but the city, by taking geological stones into the pulpit and telling their story to his hearers.  Few people in those days knew or believed that stones had a story to tell.  Detrosier had French vivacity and a voice like Lord Brougham's.  An address which he delivered on the subject of the "Elevation of the Working Class," was printed by John Cleave in London, and became as famous as Dr. Channing's address on a similar subject.  This led to his being invited to London by the political reformers of that day.  John Stuart Mill took great interest in him, and after his death contributed to the support of his widow for many years.  Detrosier died in a little street off Seymour Street, the first as you turn out of Euston Road.  The cause of his death was a chill taken by riding on an omnibus from Whitechapel, after lecturing in a heated room.  I first read of his death in the Argus of Birmingham, published by Mr. Allday, of whom I have made mention.  Subscriptions were asked for Detrosier's family.  I sent tenpence, the whole contents of a little copper money box which I had made myself.  This was my first public subscription.  The story of Detrosier's career and singular ability fascinated me, and having a little brother born at that time requiring a name, I persuaded my mother to call him Rowland.  She gave him the name of Walter Rowland.  She had a suspicion of outlandish names, and put Walter before it to civilize it.

    When my trial came on, Mr. Carlile came down to Gloucester and remained all the ten days the assizes lasted; he was in court with me to counsel me in my defence, and was, as I have said, my first visitor after the sentence.  In one of the last articles he published in the Warrior, he wrote—"I was present in the court to witness the trial of George Jacob Holyoake.  I heard Wooller and Hone defend themselves successfully in 1817; but I would prefer to be declared guilty with Holyoake to being acquitted on the ground of Wooller and Hone."

    Before my liberation in 1842 Richard Carlile was dead.  Following the example of Jeremy Bentham, Carlile left his body for dissection, and Mr. Lawrence, the eminent surgeon, was the operator.  Mr. Lawrence had published a volume of "Lectures on Man" which caused him for a time to be regarded as of Carlile's way of thinking.  They contained some materialistic passages which would excite no interest in these days, biological science having advanced far beyond Lawrence; but when the "Lectures" appeared they were regarded as so serious that the author had to recant them.  There is no reason to suppose, any more than in the case of Galileo, that the recanter's opinions were changed.

    In the days of Bentham, and long after, there was such ignorant prejudice against dissection that "subjects" could not be obtained for the uses of surgical science.  This could only be overcome by gentlemen leaving their bodies for dissection.  Jeremy Bentham, Richard Carlile, and other distinguished freethinkers ordered their bodies to be given for that purpose.  Harriet Martineau gave similar directions with regard to her remains.  There is no instance of any distinguished Christian who did this.  This generous and courageous devotion to science, though creditable to freethinkers, was a great disadvantage to their cause, and increased the public prejudice against them.

    Carlile, like Bunyan, was a tinker.  He came to London when a young man, and followed his trade for several years.  He had not Bunyan's genius, but he had his courage, and braved imprisonment and endured it with as much heroism as the author of the "Pilgrim's Progress."

    In days when gentlemen were transported for having in their possession Paine's "Age of Reason," Carlile published editions of his works.  He was imprisoned himself altogether nine years and three months—his wife was imprisoned also—more than one hundred and fifty of his shopmen were at various times imprisoned.  He not only resisted the fetters upon the press, but inspired others to resist.  He wrote heretical books, delivered lectures, and by his pen, his speech, and in his person maintained the conflict, until he established a free press.  Like Paine, recognition and credit have never been given Carlile because of his heretical sentiments.  The enlargement of freedom has always been due to heretics who have been unrequited during their day and defamed when dead.  No publisher in any country ever incurred so much peril to free the press as Richard Carlile.  Every British bookseller has profited by his intrepidity and endurance.  Speculations of philosophy and science, which are now part of the common intelligence, power, and profit, would have been stifled to this day but for him.

 
CHAPTER XXXVI.
THOMAS CARLYLE THE THINKER.
(1843.)

THE two men whose names sound alike were an instructive contrast.  Richard Carlile was all for freedom—Thomas Carlyle was all for despotism.  Carlile the publisher, was for every one thinking and speaking for himself.  Carlyle the writer was for the silence of all men but himself, and for the uninformed many submitting themselves to the imperious dominion of the wise.  Carlyle felt tenderness and taught contempt for the people.  He described them as consisting of "thirty millions, mostly fools," reserving himself as the only well-ascertained exception.  In an age when all power was in the hands of the insolent classes he preached the worship of force and ferocity.  He no doubt intended that their exercise should be directed against imposture and in favour of truth and justice, but he did not make it sufficiently clear; whereas he should have made the qualification very plain.  He applauded Governor Eyre of Jamaica, who added pianoforte wire to the cats with which he flogged working men and women—an act more likely to find imitators than Carlyle's nobler advice to practise truth and industry.  Men in the negro condition, black and white, may one day have their turn of power, when Carlyle's ferocious approval of Eyreism will invigorate many a cat and sharpen many a knife for use on respectable backs and throats—unless they learn from other teachers that firmness and clemency alone bring security.  I sent Mr. Carlyle word that he was nurturing dynamiters.

    In politics his influence has been wholly disastrous.  On industry his teachings have been less malign.  His theory of the Organization of Labour has given us State Socialists; but he has been the friend of the industrious by exalting the dignity of labour and inspiring it with honesty of execution.  But it seemed never to occur to him that there can be no general pride in labour, nor dignity in it, until it is endowed with the right of profit in its performance.

    January Searle (George Searle Phillips, who wrote under this name) told me that at a breakfast at Fryston Hall at which Carlyle was present, on my name being mentioned he observed "that was the mon who said there was no God."  I had never said that, but Carlyle, though honourably scrupulous about the truth in most things, did not always regard accuracy as of consequence, even where it pleased him to pass judgment.  Lord Dalling, who, having been all his life a diplomatist, might be supposed to be familiar with the purport of terms and scrupulous in their application, spoke in one of his last essays of "Thomas Paine the atheist."  Had he thought it necessary to proceed upon knowledge, he would have found that Paine was not only not an atheist, but a passionate theist, who founded a Society of Theists in Paris.  However, in Carlyle injustice of phrase was artistic picturesqueness rather than malevolence, and when another guest, presuming on what he had said of me, made some disparaging remark concerning me, Carlyle at once stopped him by some fierce and generous words of vindication.

    Once, when in Paisley, I had read in a newspaper published there, an attack on Carlyle's opinions, in which the editor confounded his great countryman with Richard Carlile, who was an open heretic.  Though complimentary to the party to which I belonged to see it assumed that we had so famous an adherent as Thomas Carlyle, it was not true, and I wrote and pointed out how different a school of religious thought the great Scotch thinker represented from that of Richard Carlile, the English Fleet Street publisher.  Probably Mr. Carlyle remembered this when he defended me from conventional aspersion at Lord Houghton's breakfast table.

    In what I say of Carlyle here I confine myself to his influence on politics and industry, which mainly concerns me.  His personal nobility of character, as it seems to me, is beyond praise, as it is beyond dispute.  His intrepid letter in defence of Mazzini when it was a social peril to one in Carlyle's position to own himself a friend of the great insurgent Italian, was a generous act beyond the reach of common men.  But Carlyle knew an honest man when he saw him, and his testimony thereto was at command, come what might.  Though Carlyle was the greatest ruffian in literature since the days of Dr.  Johnson, he had, like the doctor, the redeeming virtues of honesty and heroic love of truth.

    When in Canada, in 1882, I visited Carlyle's sister, Mrs. Hanning, formerly Janet Carlyle, who was then residing at Hamilton in a small detached house.  Quite a country garden lay in the rear, from which she gathered bright flowers for my daughter, who was with me—an act of pleasant familiar country life at home which made us forget that Niagara was, hard by.  Soon after Mrs. Hanning's marriage, which took place near Manchester, England, she emigrated to Canada with her husband.  Since her husband's death she had lived alone where we found her, self-dependent in a house "self-contained, as they say in her own country, keeping no servant.  Since that visit she has died.  She was tall, with decision of manner, and very much resembling in features her illustrious brother.  She had a full-length portrait of him, in which he appears reclining against a wall, in a careless manner, with hat in hand—a sketch by Count d'Orsay.  Carlyle was quite a young man then.  She had also a book-case filled with the costliest editions of her brother's works, which he had sent her from time to time.  All his volumes on Cromwell and Frederick the Great were there, and his last book on John Knox.  They all bore affectionate inscriptions written by himself.  One book which interested me was one given by Mrs. Carlyle to Mrs. Hanning.  It was when she was living near Manchester.  It bore the inscription, "To Janet Carlyle, with Jane Welsh Carlyle's affectionate regards.  Comely Bank, January 10, 1827."  It was not long after her own marriage to Carlyle, and apparently she had not anything more costly to send as a memorial of her having entered the family.  The book was one of her earlier school books, being a volume of examples in eloquence and composition of the last century—a book which happily had not influenced her own style.  That was natural, bright, and elastic, beyond anything I observed in the book, which bore an earlier inscription than the one I have quoted, namely, "Jean Welsh, 1806," written with attempts at ornament, and the letters dotted round as a child writes its name for the first time.  The book was probably sent as a memento of regard, and might have been intrinsically interesting to Miss Janet, and no doubt was, since she had preserved it to that day.

    Speaking of Mr. Froude's account of her brother, which was then the talk of America, as it was of England, she said, "Some of my family have sent me a paper wishing me to sign it as objecting to the appearance of the Froude book.  I replied I did not wish to sign it."  This was said with true Scotch sagacity and prudence.  She did not intend to sign it; but she did not offend any one by saying she would not, contenting herself with saying she "did not wish" to sign it—which still left the door open, should she see reason to do it.  She added, "Mr. Froude was a friend of my brother, and he whom my brother trusted I think the family should trust.  Mr. Froude had no doubt said the thing that was."  And then, drawing herself up with a gesture of dignity, she said, "My brother was always for the truth, and so am I,"—a declaration which had the true Carlylean ring in it.

    It was Mrs. Carlyle's letters which, being published, had caused the trouble.  Carlyle had shown his noble sense of justice by desiring their publication, although he knew the impression they would make would be against himself.  I remarked to Mr. Froude one day, when he did me the honour to call upon me, that to desire to publish her letters was in Carlyle an act of justice to her memory.  "Yes," answered the great historian, "but what man thinks of doing justice to his wife?"  The singular thing is that Mr. Froude, who published these works in obedience to Carlyle's wish, who desired him as his friend to do it, has been censured, as though he had been the author of the letters.  It was noble of Mr. Froude to incur all this censure himself through fidelity to his friend, and it seems to me an act of justice to record that Carlyle's sister had honour in her heart for Mr. Froude.

    A Spanish scholar left Mr. Carlyle a thousand pounds, who, remembering that the brother of the donor had suffered some reverses, Mr. Carlyle inquired whether he had become free of them, otherwise, if the money would be useful to him, he, the legatee, desired to place it at his disposal, as he (Mr. Carlyle) was free from prospect of reverse, and he should remember his friend all the same for his generous regard of him.  This act implied a nature of natural nobleness.  It is common to find men who have a biting tongue, which they cannot restrain, yet possessed of instinctive tenderness and generosity.

 
CHAPTER XXXVII.
A VISIT TO THE LAST COMMUNITY.
(1843.)

WITHIN sixty years there have been four communities in England—Orbiston, Motherwell, Manea Fen, and Queenwood.  The promoters were not merely Socialists, they were Communists.  As this is still a name of terror, it will interest many readers to have a glimpse of the last place where they had a local habitation and a name.

    Cobden, in affairs of trade or peace, had good discernment.  In social aims, with which he had little sympathy, he was undiscriminating.  In his day communism was a term of alarm in the mind of ignorance, and was exaggerated by interest, which knew better.  Though before 1840 there existed community societies, the persons belonging to them were spoken of as "members of the community society," not communists.  Communism was a Continental term, scarcely recognized or used in England.  Mr. Cobden used it as a term of social spoliation.  An English community, as the followers of Robert Owen understood it, was a self-supporting industrial city, distinguished by common labour, common property, and common means of intelligence and recreation.  These communal cities were to be examples of industrialism freed from competition.  In the communal life an ethical character was to be formed in the young and impressed upon adults, and all assured education, leisure, and ultimate competence.  As this was the first systematized social conception in which I believed, and believe no less in it still, it is relevant for me to give some account of the last English attempt to realize it in my time.

    On Monday morning, October 14, 1843, I "wended my way," as the novelists say, down by Parliament House, over Vauxhall Bridge, on my visit to Harmony Hall.  At the Nine Elms terminus I demanded a ticket for Nine Mile Water, Harmony Hall.  "Oh," said the official in the railway office, "you must take a ticket to Farnborough! that's the station."  Taking it for granted that he knew, in five minutes I was on my way to Farnborough, the rain coming down like a workman too late for the factory bell, the wind blowing with preternatural velocity.  In due time I alighted at Farnborough Station, and thought, "Well, after all, Harmony Hall is not so far off as people have said," and I looked about for one of the Community vehicles.  But I found myself surrounded by a crowd of Frenchmen talking with the explosiveness of volleys of musketry, and I thought, "Surely these people can't belong to Harmony Hall, unless they are the 'hired labourers,' who were then unpopular."  I inquired at once for Queenwood.  "Queenwood," said the marvelling superintendent, "there was a gentleman once before came here asking for that place.  It is forty or fifty miles below.  You had better take the next train to Winchester, and then inquire again!'"  I had nothing to do but to turn myself to the fire and the Frenchmen, in the hopes of finding either warmth or amusement.  In a few minutes I found that the Frenchmen were king's attendants waiting for the arrival of Louis Philippe and the Queen, who were expected from Windsor at one o'clock.  Before long, I observed some strange-looking men darting off at all angles without any apparent reason, and pushing people about I could not tell why.  But soon I discovered their movements followed on the nod and beck of a marble-eyed elderly gentleman, who was, if I mistake not, one of Sir James Graham's special commissioners, whom I saw at Gloucester Gaol, and I knew I was surrounded by the A Division of Police from Scotland Yard, who darted about at every roll of the official orbs before mentioned.  I immediately called in all external signs of curiosity, and commenced to wear an entirely neutral look, by which means I noticed everybody in security.  When the Royal party arrived from Windsor, even the gaping gentry of the neighbourhood were thrust to the back of the building.  At every avenue policemen brandished their batons; a poor Frenchman, looking over a gate, was rudely thrust back, and given in charge of the police; and none but officials and myself stood in the narrow passage made for their Majesties to pass.  Finding me walking about the rooms, they probably regarded me as a station assistant.  I therefore took a position by the side of the police, deeming that the best place for passing unsuspected, and I was right.  Guizot first interested me.  His half-military dress detracted from his philosophical character, but his well-moulded head and firm features, resting upon his iron-looking shoulders, gave him, though rather a short man, an appearance of majesty which none of their Majesties possessed.  He looked one of the princes of what the Chambers styled the "intellectual aristocracy"—a new phrase of that time used by them.  Many a Frenchman would envy me.  Louis Philippe I could have shot half-a-dozen times, had I been so disposed.  There was nothing inviting about him.  His cheeks hung like collapsed pudding bags.  The only thing to which I could compare his head was an inverted humming-top.  The people of France, I learned afterwards, had nicknamed him "Louis le Poire," or the pear-headed, from the resemblance they discovered in his face and head to an inverted pear.  And Paris was placarded with pictures of pears bearing his face, with the words annexed, "When the pear is rotten, it will fall," as afterwards happened.

    Prince Albert had a right princely appearance.  His large German eyes were singularly full and glaring.  He looked as though he was well fed, and without care whence his meals came.  None of these notables had I seen before.  The Queen I had not seen since she was a girl, and I wondered how the cooped-up, swaddled thing I saw in Birmingham when she was eleven years old, had become so graceful a young woman.  I was agreeably surprised at her.  The breezes of Blair Athol had left her quite blooming, and her pretty Saxon-looking face, beaming both with maternal affection and thought, quite prepossessed me in her favour.  I do but record my impressions at the time.  The Royal party passed on to Gosport, for Louis Philippe was going home, having been on a visit to our Court.

    About three o'clock I was again on the line making another attempt to get to Harmony Hall.  How the wind blows on the Southampton railway over its uncovered carriages!  Even on the Brighton line, then and long after, third-class passengers made the journey in open trucks, where a mother could ill-protect her child from the rain, and with difficulty prevent it from being blown away.  Who travel to Hants in October weather should tie caps upon their heads and their heads on their shoulders.  My cap, which had seen some service, having had six months' imprisonment, was almost blown into its original fleece, and was near regaining its first abode on the backs of the neighbouring sheep.  When I reached Winchester it was half-past four o'clock, and Stockbridge was nine miles off.  No conveyance being procurable, and the rain abating, I walked the distance.

    At last, regular Egyptian darkness—such as could be felt—set in, but where Stockbridge lay, whether near or far, on hill or in hollow, I knew not.  At last, feeling my way with my umbrella, I ran against something that proved to be a ploughman, from whom I learned that I was on the verge of the village, that I must "turn by the Ship, ask for the Queen's Head, and tell Stone that I was one of the Zozialites," and I would be all right.  There I found a pretty, kind creature of a landlady, and by half-past seven I was engaged with toast and tea, and listening to the song of one of those organized fungi which seem to vegetate about Stockbridge in the shape of farm labourers.

    In those days there were no village reading-rooms.  Hetherington's Poor Man's Guardian had never been heard of in Stockbridge.  Newspapers were then sixpence and ninepence each, and were seen only by the squire or the clergyman, who never lent them to the cottagers.  No union of agricultural labourers was thought of.  The company I was in reached the highest point of their existence with a mug of beer and a song.  There was no assembly in the Queen's Head of long pipes and village philosophers such as George Eliot has depicted in "Silas Marner."  One of the Stockbridge zoophytes was singing, for the amusement of his companions, a song, of which the, best applauded couplet was—

Had these lines come upon them with the novelty of originality, the delight they caused could not have been more spontaneous.  They quite brought down the tap-room.  The landlady smiled from the bar window, partly in applause of the singer and partly to encourage business.  This was the high water mark of intellectuality to which the parson and the squire had brought the farm labourers of Stockbridge.

    The next morning I set out for Queenwood.  It rained then as in the days of Noah.  My directions were "to pass through the village, and, at a mile and a half onwards, to turn off to the left by a gentleman's house, which would lead me (somehow) to Broughton."  I was now fairly in the land of flint and chalk.  Everywhere lay flanks of earth, dressed in nature's shabbiest attire—not unlike a man in threadbare hose, and the mounds of white chalk, peeping up here and there, presented the picture of nature out at the elbows.  When high on the road that lay "by the gentleman's house," I asked my way of an old villager, who, unfortunately for me, "knew the road well."  He sent me along this field, over that, by a stile "which I should be sure to see" (but be sure not to know), and after turning here, and turning there, I should come out (somewhere) in Broughton.

    Reader, beware of one who knows the way.  Were I about to be hanged (that being the time when persons who never had any wisdom commence to give important advice) the first thing I should warn young persons against would be those people who "know the way."  Many a week I have walked five times farther than the real way through following the directions of people who sent me the "nearest" way.  When a stranger asks his road, instead of being directed straightforward through highways or well-known streets, which he could not miss, somebody who knows all the lanes and byways, courts and alleys, will send him through them.  The moment a stranger enters the first of these, he knows not where he is, and has to spend more time in making inquiries than would take him ten times the actual distance.  Some plain-minded person, who knows little about a place, is the man for a guide.  In Bristol, when I went in 1841 to visit Charles Southwell, then in prison there for wounding what Lord Salisbury would call the "grotesque susceptibilities" of Sir Charles Weatherell, I had the good fortune to be taken to Bristol Bridge.  This became my centre of transit.  Every where I went I started from Bristol Bridge.  I was never so happy in any town.  In London, though always being directed "the nearest way," I am sure I have walked a thousand unnecessary miles.

    After a time, I discovered the road I had left, which soon brought me to Broughton, a pleasant village to look at; but all its pleasantness was outside.  It was plain and dull enough within.  But as it was the first relief from barrenness and stones, one was glad to see it.  About a mile through it, over a chalk hill, is the next road to be taken, and as the traveller descends the hill's brow, he comes suddenly upon Harmony Hall—an entirely respectable—looking building, half red, half blue, a compound of brick and slate of oblong shape, with two spires in front, and two glass chimneys, apparently intended to let people see the smoke come up; but further examination tells you they are lanterns over the corridors leading to the dormitories.  "C. M. 1841," are observable at one end of the building, which informed me, for the first time, that the Millennium had commenced three years ago.

    Verdure and beauty first make their appearance in the neighbourhood of the Hall.  Around pleasant prospects arise.  But it was a place to look at rather than to live on.  The soil had been made productive at great expense; but the flints which covered the land pointed out the place as one intended by nature, not for a colony of Socialists, but for a colony of gunsmiths, who, before percussion caps came up, might have made their fortunes there.

    No devisers are perfect all at once, even in community making, and the site chosen for it in Hampshire, remote from any seat of manufacture or of commerce,  was a disadvantage.  The quality of the soil was also against the success of the agricultural community.  Sir Isaac Lyon Goldsmid, being in friendly relation with Robert Owen, was a reason why that site was chosen.  Indeed, at that time it was difficult to obtain land anywhere.  A beautiful avenue was preserved upon it; a part of the estate called Rosewood, with a sequestered building in it, was entitled to the name.  Roads were laid out at great cost worthy of the Romans.  An imposing hall was erected by Mr. Hansom, the inventor of the cab which Disraeli called the gondola of London.  It was built as the "new world" should be built.  Forged nails, not machine-made nails, were used in fixing lath and plank.  The parts out of sight were as honestly done as those in sight.  There was nothing mean about the place.  The lower rooms had a costly range of windows, the walls were tastefully panelled, the sides of the room were ribbed with mahogany, and all the tables, neither few nor small, were of the same costly material.  The place served as a dining room when I was there.  The kitchen had hardly a rival in London for its completeness.  So much was expended in this way (£30,000 altogether), that there was insufficient to put into cultivation the Little and Great Bentley farms.  It is due to Mr. Owen to state that he never approved of the attempt to establish a community with the insufficient capital then at command.  Mr. Galpin, a banker at Salisbury, had subscribed £8,000 or more, Mr. William Pare £5,000.  Mr. Frederick Bate put in £14,000 his total fortune bequeathed to him.  Half a million of money was necessary to complete the community on the scale on which the board of directors commenced.  The administration being democratic, there was no concentration of authority, so indispensable until success had repaid the capitalists.  The arrears of rent accumulated, which the profit from the farms was insufficient to meet.  The three trustees who were responsible, evicted, in the Irish fashion, the governor and his family, who encamped in the lanes for some days.  The trustees then let the estate to George Edmondson, a Quaker and famous Yorkshire educator.  It then became Queenwood College, as it is still known.  Professor Tyndall was one of the teachers of science there.  In a few years £11,000 of profit accumulated, which Lord Romilly, on the suit of Mr. Pare, myself, and others, ordered to be distributed among the principal shareholders, and the place to be sold and the proceeds further divided.  Nothing came to the smaller community shareholders, whom I represented.  It was clear that this project under purely commercial management might have paid as a social university, and ultimately as an agricultural settlement.  Had it not been denounced by the clergy and the Bishop of Exeter, it is probable that Mr. Owen's great influence had obtained capital sufficient to establish an industrial city.  Many independent families contemplated going to reside there, the rent of whose tenements would have made the place prosperous.  It was a satisfaction at last to see a noble college established there, in which students were educated in the arts of industry as well as in science and classical literature, which had never been united on so large a scale elsewhere in England.  It was one part of the community scheme.

    Thus ended the last of the English communities.  Proud efforts were made for its success—noble sacrifices on the part of hundreds of working men were made, ungrudgingly and unrepiningly, although all the savings of their lifetime were lost in it.  After lectures in the provinces, to this day grey-headed old men and women oft come to me recalling their sacrifices, which they never regret, and still believe they were not made in vain.  The intelligent poor in our chief cities were animated with hope when "community" was named.  Toil-worn men at the anvil, at the loom, and in the mine, regarded it as opening to them a way to industrial independence out of the otherwise pathless desert of their lives.

 
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
STORY OF THE ODDFELLOWS PRIZE LECTURES
(1845-6.)

THESE chapters appear in general chronological order; though it is difficult to think over your life in strict consecutiveness of detail.  Sometimes incidents come back to the mind which were as much out of sight as though they had emigrated.  If a story has interest in itself, and it is apparent when its incidents did occur, the reader is commonly content.

    In my youth I had a moderate faculty of memory, which I endeavoured to improve after the manner suggested by Jacotot, who had fascinated me.  Taking Pope's "Essay on Man," I learned the two first lines, next day two more, always repeating the lines learned.  Thus at the end of a year I could repeat 730 lines; at the end of the second year I could repeat 1,460.  Then the time required to repeat 1,460 lines, with the addition of new lines each morning, obliged me to desist.  This daily use of memory no doubt was an advantage to me when I came to deliver lectures.  Though I could not always foresee what I should say when I began to speak, I could always tell what I had said when I had spoken.  The act of speaking in public fixed the words in my mind as though they were palpable in the air before me.  For six months or more after my speech in the Court at Gloucester, I could repeat all I said, though I spoke upwards of nine hours.  To this day I remember where I was, in what town, in what place, in what house, or at what exact spot, when a particular thought first entered my mind.  It is far from my intention to convey the impression that everything I relate is errorless, unless I have been able to verify it, for many details of affairs must have passed from my memory.  Yet to mean to be right, and to take trouble to be right, is all a narrator can do for the reader, and the reader is not badly used who gets that.

    In 1845, it fell to me to go to Glasgow.  Scotland was then an unknown world to me, and I set out, as I do still on a new journey, elated and glad with curiosity, not less so then that our way was over the "dour" sea to Greenock.  Our little household then included two little ones.  We arrived late one evening at a temperance hotel in Liverpool, near to the dock.  Temperance hotels were then penal settlements of teetotalism.  A rasher of bacon (which had grown black by exposure, and dry as a slice of mummy cat), an old teapot, a chipped cup and cracked saucer, lying in a dusty window, were the outward signs and melancholy emblems of a temperance hostelry in those days.

    My engagement in Glasgow was to lecture to a society of Mr. Owen's followers, which held its meetings in a pleasant little chapel in Great Hamilton Street, near Glasgow Green.  I was the last of the stationed lecturers, then called "Social Missionaries."

    Soon after my arrival I learned that the Manchester Unity of Oddfellows offered five prizes of £10 each for the five best lectures to be read to the members of the Order on taking successive degrees.  The subjects were to be "Charity, Truth, Knowledge, Science, and Progression."

    Before this time four of the degrees of the Order bore the designations of white, blue, scarlet, and gold.  The ceremony of initiation included a marvellous dialogue.  For instance, a candidate for the scarlet degree was asked by the Noble Grand, "Whence come you?"  Not even Dr. Darwin could answer that question satisfactorily.  The candidate dexterously avoided the scientific difficulty, if he was conscious of it, by answering that he came "from Mount Horeb."  All the while the man had never been there, and probably did not know even its situation.  The candidate was then asked, "Where are you sojourning?" and he replied, "To the inward Court of the Sanctuary."   When the further question was put to him, "How will you gain your admittance?" the answer was, "By my sign and password."  This does not seem sufficient had there been a real Sanctuary with an Inner Court, which the Manchester Unity never possessed.  The candidate for the gold degree was asked, "Whom do you represent?" and he replied, "The son of Onias, the High Priest, who repaired the House of God and fortified the Temple"—a very respectable delegation if accompanied by genuine credentials.  When asked, "In what light will he appear in the Lodge?" he replied, with wondrous self-complacency, "As the morning star or the moon at full, I shall cheer and refresh the minds of my brethren like the sun on the Temple of the Most High or the rainbow in the heavens."  These Colney Hatch answers did very well in the first half of this century, but men in the second half could never be got to give them.  The Grand Master therefore advised a change.

    In justice to the Order it ought to be admitted that the Old Degree Book was not all of this extraordinary complexion.  There were some scattered injunctions of worldly wisdom and worth, such as—

    "Be honest to yourself and connection.
    Follow your occupation whereby to provide personal sufficiency and something over wherewith to relieve distress.
    Be honest to your neighbour by not imposing upon or overreaching him.
    Be honest, by candidly acting towards your brother, not professing one thing and meaning another.
    Be temperate in the exercise of the powers and passions of body and mind.
    Be temperate in forming opinion, in expressing it, and in attempting to obtain your wishes.
    You are always to recommend to equals courtesy and affability, to superiors kindness and condescension."

    These were excellent Senecan sentences.  Oddfellowship, like religion, can only sustain and commend itself by association with morality.

    In writing the new lectures, I followed the rule I adopted early in life, of never embarrassing myself by conjecturing what other competitors would say, nor by imagining what adjudicators, or readers, or hearers would expect me to say.  I simply considered what ought to be said on a given subject—what was true and relevant as far as I could discern—and endeavoured to say it as plainly and clearly as I was able.  Napoleon's one injunction to his secretaries—"Be clear"—seemed to me to include the first duty of author or speaker, and I applied it not only to the sentences, but to the writing of the Prize Lectures.  I wrote them out in a plain Palmerstonian hand.  Capital letters I printed, so that the beginning of sentences should be well marked.  I left a broad margin, in which I wrote in red ink the subject of each paragraph.  All the pages of each lecture were put into a separate coloured cover, bearing a cube in isometrical perspective, merely because it was ornamental, and mitigated the dulness of a blank cover.  The motto I took was “Justice is sufficient," believing that no one ought to ask for more, and that this would be a happy world if every one got that.

    The result of this was that my five books of lectures would be sure to be looked at, and when opened the red letter words in the margin enabled the appointed reader to see at once the method and quality of treatment, and be able at a glance to decide whether they were entitled to further examination.  There were 79 competitors for the prizes, and if each sent in five lectures the adjudicators would have 395 to peruse.  They would be sure, therefore, whatever the number, to take up first those they could read most easily.

    It was probable that some competitors would send in only one or may be two lectures, such as they thought they could best write.  Thus it would be difficult to combine five lectures by five different persons in one set, while one person writing the whole would give them due gradation and unity; and unity would be essential.  Therefore I sent in five.

    As I was a member of the Robert Burns Lodge of Glasgow, I was eligible to compete.  Only one person knew of my intention to do so.  The method, matter, or manner of what I wrote no one knew.  Though, as I have said, there were 79 competitors, and some of them clergymen, none, when they came to read the lectures adopted, complained of the adjudication of all the prizes to me.  I had left Scotland long before the award, and had made up my mind I was out of the running, when one day the Grand Master called upon me and handed me five £10 notes.  I remember I was much surprised, for I had never even seen so much money before.  It was with this money that I set up the Reasoner.

    When it became known in the Order that the prizes were awarded to me, some apprehensive members raised the question whether the money ought to be paid to me, or whether the Order ought to use the lectures written by me.  An earthquake might happen in the Order if what I had written were read officially from time to time to a quarter of a million of men who belonged to the great Unity, for the memory of Gloucester Gaol was quite lively in the public mind.  But the Order was honest, and I was paid.  To pay a second time for worse lectures seemed bad economy and bad policy, and so the lectures were adopted.  Several years elapsed before I made any public mention of my connection with them.  As secrecy was to the interest of the Order, it was my duty to keep silence.  Some enthusiastic officer of the Order, anxious to justify their choice, published privately an edition of the lectures for the gratification of members interested in seeing them.  This was a serious breach of faith of which I knew nothing.  I had taken no part in that step, and would have opposed it had I known of it.  Some, indeed, thought I might have done it; but the directors did me the justice to entirely disbelieve that I had any knowledge of, or connivance in, the surreptitious publication.

 
CHAPTER XXXIX.
SINGULAR COINCIDENCES.
(1846.)

THE shrewder officers of the Manchester Unity of Oddfellows were right.  Though no rumblings of earthquake were heard in the Order, some premonitory symptoms were felt six years later.  But for six years calm pervaded the solid earth of the widespread Unity.  Assurance that it would be so came in a letter from the Noble Grand Master of the Robert Burns Lodge, addressed to me in London.  He had been attending the Grand Moveable Committee at Bristol, and on his return home he wrote as follows:—

"124, GALLOWGATE, GLASGOW, June 11, 1846.

"SIR AND BROTHER,—Inclosed is an order to any Lodge to which you may go to receive the Quarterly Password and Degree.
    "We had a very fine meeting at Bristol, and I dare say that much has been done to consolidate and improve our Order.  I also had the pleasure of perusing our New Lectures.  They are splendid essays upon the subjects they treat of, and I wish the Board of Directors may soon get them circulated.  I believe they will be the means of doing much good.  They will undoubtedly give great satisfaction to all your friends here.—I am, my dear sir, yours faithfully,

"THOMAS DONALDSON."

    About 1852 the Unity sought legal protection.  The Grand Master of the Order, Mr. William Benjamin Smith, of Birmingham, had drawn up a masterly statement of the disadvantages under which the Unity, as a friendly society, lay in respect of the funds being at the mercy of any knavish officer with a gift for plunder.  When the protective bill which was passed by the Commons went up to the House of Lords, the Bishop of Oxford opposed it on the ground that I had written their Degree Lectures.  The bishop, who was naturally tolerant and fair-minded, had been influenced or misled by statements forwarded to him by enemies of the bill acquainted with the origin of the lectures.  What took place then, and how the bishop came to withdraw his opposition, the reader will see recounted in the chapter on the "Generosity of the Bishop of Oxford."

    Another objection of a different kind, and not easy to be refuted, might have been brought against the genuineness of the lectures, founded upon a passage in one of them, had any one had the wit to make it.  When I was writing the lecture on Charity, I was living in the house of Mr. David Glassford, St.  Mirren's Street, Paisley.  The house has been pulled down, and the street is all changed now.  I sat with my back to a small bookcase, and often rested my head against the glass front as I cast about in thought for some new argument which should be clear and entirely secular.  Though Secularism as a new form of thought and action was not then in my mind; I had merely a taste for reasoning on morality apart from theology.  At length I put my argument thus:

    "The great obstacles in the way of the friendly intercourse of man with man are the incurable dislikes which some men have the misfortune to entertain for each other.  But when we once agree 'to consider the errors of mankind as arising rather from the want of knowledge than the defects of goodness,' we learn to feel for the most despicable some sympathy on account of their unhappy condition.  We see that those who agree not with us have some difference in capacity, constitution, or education; and, instead of being repelled because their opinions and tastes seem inferior to our own, we are invited by a prospect of improving and enlightening them—for the voice of kindness and intelligence never fails to soften and refine the rugged and the ignorant.  Hence we may be charitable to those we deem mentally unfortunate.  If we behold a fellow-creature running counter to his own happiness, we are satisfied that it is rather his misfortune than his fault.

    "This sentiment, that thus has a basis in intelligence, is also justified by self-love and confirmed by human interest.  Should you hate your fellow-man, what reason is there that he should not hate you?  If you shall regard him but with indifference, you justify him in regarding you with indifference; and why should you provoke only apathy where possibly you might win esteem?  But if you fall on the wiser and happier alternative of affection, or at least friendliness, as dislike creates dislike, so love awakens love, the kindlier emotions are reciprocated, and men who else were foes become, by the generous influence of enlightened charity, pacific and fraternal."

    At the time I believed this argument to be entirely new.  It never occurred to me before, nor had I ever heard or seen anything like it.  Some time after the prizes referred to were awarded, and sent to the press, I was again a guest of Mr. Glassford in the same house and occupying the same room.  The day being wet and misty as only a Scotch day can be, I turned to the bookcase against which I had formerly sat, just to see what kind of dusty-looking books my friend kept there.  It was necessary in my vocation to understand the Covenanter mind, and this seemed an opportunity of doing it.  The narrow bookcase was let into the wall, and previously I had thought it locked.  Finding it was not, I opened it, and the very first book I took down was a volume of sermons by Bishop Hooker.  I had read of the "judicious" bishop, but had never had a work of his in my hands, and I was glad and curious to judge for myself in what the "judiciousness" consisted for which he