Mr. Shaen—who, by the way, had, I gather, previously acted as solicitor to Mr. Holyoake, and who many years later showed a decided personal hostility towards Mr. Bradlaugh. After many delays Mr. Shaen at length made his award in August 1863 in favour of Mr. Holyoake, and my father writing to a friend at the time says rather grimly: "The only good stroke of luck lately is that I am ordered by Shaen to pay G. J. H. £81, 18s. Linton will tell you the particulars."
In May 1862 Messrs W. H. Smith & Son first officially refused to supply their agents with the National Reformer. They then occupied the chief railway station bookstalls in England, but were not quite the monopolists they are to-day, and Mr. Bradlaugh could for a little while at least get his paper sold at all the stations, numbering some sixty or seventy, on the North Eastern and Newcastle and Carlisle railways, at which book agencies were held by a Mr. Franklin. It is wonderful, indeed, how this journal managed to live through more than thirty years in spite of this powerful boycott, extending as it afterwards did to every part of the kingdom. Mr. Bradlaugh called upon his friends to use every effort to keep up the sale. "We will do our part," he wrote, "and we call upon our friends, east, west, north, and south, to do their duty also." During the last year of his life Mr. Bradlaugh was given to understand that the boycott would be raised, and that Messrs W. H. Smith & Son would be willing to take the National Reformer on to the railway bookstalls, but the first expenses would have been so great that he was unwilling to enter into the further financial liabilities which the new departure would have involved.
The National Reformer was not only from its earliest years refused by the most powerful booksellers in England, but it was maligned in a quarter where indeed it might have looked for fair play and a little justice—I mean by the Unitarians.[38] The cynical reflection that those who have themselves broken away from the conventional thought of the times always damn those who go a little further than themselves, carries a germ of truth within its bitter shell. The Unitarian body always seem to treat Freethinkers with an acrimony special to themselves and us. Individual Unitarians whom I have known personally have been kind, pleasant, liberal-minded people, but Unitarians as a body or as represented by their organ seldom enough have turned a kindly side towards atheists.
With every man's hand against it, with financial difficulties to cripple it, both the editor and the company of the unfortunate paper felt compelled to review the situation, and put matters on a somewhat different footing. Hence at a duly convened meeting held in September the company was wound up, and Mr. Bradlaugh "appointed liquidator according to the terms of the Joint Stock Company's Act, 1856." From this time the sole responsibility, financial and otherwise, rested upon my father. Unfortunately, a few months later his health broke down, and at the urgent entreaty of his friends he "most reluctantly resolved to determine his connection as Editor, and to retire entirely from the conduct and responsibilities of the paper."
He begged therefore the support of all friends to Mr. John Watts, who had consented to take up the onerous burden of editorship. Mr. John Watts, in an address published the following week, wished it to be understood that he was taking up the editorship at the "express wish" of Iconoclast. On quitting the editor's chair with the issue of No. 146 (Feb. 28), Mr. Bradlaugh gave expression to his wishes in regard to the conduct of the paper.
"I should wish," he says, "that the National Reformer may continue to advocate the fullest liberty of thought and utterance, conceding to others that which it claims for itself. That it should be plain and honest in its attacks on shams. That it should spare no falsehood merely because uttered by a great man, show no mercy to royal treachery simply from reverence for royalty, and have no pardon for crowned wrong while ragged wrong shall suffer. … "
To Freethinkers and Radicals he says, with a bitter prescience of his own future fate indicated in some of his words: "Your duty lies not in petty personal strife, but in the diffusion of the great and mighty truths for which our predecessors have risked stake and dungeon. Your duty is not to take part in disputes whether John or Thomas is the better leader, but rather so to live as to need no leaders. A public man's life is composed of strange phases. If successful, he wins his success with hard struggling. As he struggles the little great ones before him, who envy his hope, block up his path. His ignorance is exposed, his incapability made manifest; and then when he has won the victory, and made a place for standing, each envious cowardly caviller, who dares not meet him face to face, stabs him with base innuendo in the back. I do not envy any statesman's character in the hands of his political antagonists, still less do I envy when I hear him dissected behind his back by his pseudo-friends."
In concluding his article he gives special praise to Mr. John Watts and Mr. Austin Holyoake for their help on the paper, taking the blame for all its past shortcomings on his own shoulders.
From February 1863 until April 1866 Mr. John Watts edited the National Reformer; but unless my father happened to be abroad, as he frequently was during the early part of the sixties, traces of him were to be found somewhere or other in the paper, either in an article from his pen, a letter, or answers to correspondents on legal points. During these three years he contributed several notable articles, such as "Notes on Genesis and Exodus," "The Oath Question," "Real Representation of the People," "A Plea for Atheism," "Universality of Heresy," "The Atonement," "Antiquity and Unity of the Origin of the Human Race," "The Twelve Apostles," "Why do Men Starve?" and "Labour's Prayer," and many of which have been from time to time revised or rewritten, and published and republished in pamphlet form.
He also gave the paper considerable financial assistance, amounting in the three years to upwards of £250.
On the 22nd of April 1866, a notice appeared in the National Reformer to the effect that Mr. Bradlaugh would resume his editorial duties on the paper, of which he had never relinquished the copyright. The occasion for this announcement was a very sad one. Just as in 1863 Mr. Bradlaugh, overtaken by illness, was obliged to lay aside his burden of editorship, so in 1866 Mr. John Watts also became too ill to continue his work. But the illness of Mr. John Watts was unhappily more serious than Mr. Bradlaugh's; it was the forerunner of his death. In the November of the same year a career of some promise was cut short at its opening, and Mr. John Watts died of consumption at the early age of thirty-two.
When he learned of his friend's illness my father readily consented to resume his former task as editor, and appointed as sub-editor Mr. Charles Watts, who spoke of the satisfaction it had been to his brother to have so willing and able a friend take charge of the paper once more. A little later Mr. Austin Holyoake was associated in the sub-editing with Mr. Charles Watts.
Thus in 1866 the journal was once more under the full control of Mr. Bradlaugh, and although he subsequently, for a time, associated another editor with himself, he thought for it and fought for it, wrote for it and cared for it, from that time until within a fortnight of his death, when from his dying bed he dictated a few words for me to write. He had to fight for it in press and law court.
In 1867 the high-priced and refined Saturday Review started the story, so often repeated since, that Mr. Bradlaugh had compared God with a monkey with three tails; and further declared, with that delicacy of language which one expects to meet in such aristocratic company, that "such filthy ribaldry as we have, from a sense of duty, picked off Bradlaugh's dunghill, is simply revolting, odious, and nauseating to the natural sense of shame possessed by a savage." Needless to say, the "savage" feelings of the Saturday Review were much too delicate to admit any reply from the editor of the journal attacked. Mr. Bradlaugh, of course, replied in his own paper, and "B. V." took up the cudgels also on behalf of his friend. He wrote at some length, and the following quotation truly and amusingly pictures the National Reformer at least:—
"This poor N. R.! Let us freely admit that it has many imperfections, many faults; its poverty secures for it a constant supply of poor writers, while securing for us, the poor writers, an opportunity of publishing what we could hardly get published elsewhere. But I fear not to affirm that, by its essential character, it is quite incomparably superior to such a paper
