THE NEW ASPECT OF THE AFFIRMATION BILL.
WE are not particularly well pleased—except so far as the change promises a speedier, though a scantier measure of justice—with the decision of the Government that what is called the retrospective action of the Affirmation Bill is to be dropped. If it is just to allow any constituency to elect whom they will to a seat in the House of Commons, without imposing on the person chosen any theological test, it is clearly just to insist that, when once he has been thus chosen, —hateful as we regard some of his convictions and some of his denials,—he ought to be permitted to take his seat in the House of Commons without imposing on him any such test, and with- out subjecting him to special disabilities on the ground that he has been franker with the House of Commons than many of his brother-Members. The Clergy seem to us to have got into their heads the very unmanly and immoral idea that if you can find the means of politically plaguing an Atheist of immoral opinions, you ought to do so, even though you cannot justify on any principle the course you pursue. Nobody pretends that a genuine theistic test ought to be elaborated and en- forced on Members of the House of Commons. Nobody pre- tends that the present Oath was imposed in order to play the part of such a test, or that it could be defended on principle if it had been imposed for that purpose. And yet, all those who argue against the Affirmation Bill, argue that it is right to take advantage of a sheer political accident, which no one asks us to erect into a permanent barrier, for the purpose of keeping an objectionable Member outside the House of Com- mons. We confess that that seems to us a very petty sort of political injustice. We could say a great deal in favour of making one of Mr. Bradlaugh's books the ground for expelling him from the House of Commons. We can say nothing at all in favour of the spiteful advantage which the pseudo- religious party have taken of his frankness with the House of Commons, to keep him out of his seat by a side-wind. It seems to us that it is often right to smite evil as evil. But we deny that it is ever right to deny to a man in whom we find evil, simply because we find that evil in him, the full advantage of the general principles which we have laid down for all Englishmen alike. We therefore take no pleasure at all in the decision of the Government to follow a precedent in itself tainted with the same kind of injustice, by refusing retrospective effect to the Affirmation Bill. The only result
of that refusal is that it will put Mr. Bradlaugh to the expense of seeking a new election, and will give his opponents one more chance of defeating him at the poll,—unfairly, as it seems to us, in both cases. Nothing would please us better than to see Mr. Bradlaugh defeated at the poll, if his seat had been vacated through any of the ordinary causes which vacate seats. But we feel more keenly any deliberate unfairness to one whose principles we condemn so strongly as we con- demn Mr. Bradlaugh's, than we should feel it towards a man whom we could admire and revere. There is nothing which seems to us more obligatory than to be scrupulously just in our treatment of those whom we dislike and condemn.
Still, the effect of the new departure is undoubtedly this, —that the Conservatives, instead of being able for the future to call the Affirmation Bill a Bradlaugh Relief Bill, ought, if they were but just, to call it a Bill for compelling Mr. Bradlaugh to run the gauntlet of a third election before taking his seat. Considering that no one pleads for a genuine theistic test for Members of Parliament, that no one supposes that such a test is even possible, that every one of the " pious " party regards the chance of keeping out Mr. Bradlaugh as a mere wind- fall for them, to which his own frankness has accidentally exposed him, it must be admitted, we think, that, far from being a Bradlaugh Relief Bill, this is a Bill for imposing a mild species of pains and penalties on a particular atheist who happened to have confided his state of mind to the House. We quite admit that the precedent drawn from the reluct- ant relief afforded to Roman Catholics is a strong pre- cedent, and covers exactly the same ground. Only we should say that there also injustice was done, owing to the exceeding parsimony with which English religion usually deals out justice to those whom it has formerly thought it its duty to withstand. Mr. O'Connell, the elected Roman Catholic candidate of 1829, was elected with a full knowledge of his Roman Catholicism, and, indeed, because of his Roman Catholicism ; and to put him to the necessity of appealing again to his constituents to say that they would elect him none the less willingly because Parlia- ment had accorded to him a tardy and scanty justice, was to our mind simply unfair. And so with Mr. Brad- laugh. Northampton, no doubt, had the bad-taste to elect him in great measure because of his well-known denial of faith in a God, and it would be simply ridiculous to suppose that anybody voted for him so long as the Oath stood in his way, who would refuse to vote for him after the obstacle had been removed. At least, if any such there were, they certainly deserved to have no new chance of rejecting him, for they knew that the House itself might at any time admit him to take the oath, if the majority should be disposed so to do. We think that both in 1829 and now, the election validly made, and to which effect could not be given only because the oath could not be taken, should have been accepted, so soon as the special difficulty was removed. However, the Government have decided otherwise, and we do not doubt that their deci- sion will much facilitate the passing of a good Bill, though not the Bill which we should have preferred. And cer- tainly, it takes away the last excuse which any one not desirous of imposing a strict Theistic test can offer for
opposing it. Even the House of Lords will hardly venture to refuse the House of Commons the power of accepting an affirmation instead of an oath, from those who regard the affirmation as equally obligatory on them and as a more veracious expression of their true mind. At least, if the Peers do choose to make a great constitutional question of the oath, it is clear that they must, in common consistency, alter the oath itself, and do whatever they can to prevent its being taken, as it has so often been taken, by Agnostics, Secularists, Positivists, and Indifferentists,—in fact, by men to whom religious questions have never been serious questions in any sense, and who have repeated the oath just as they would stand up at grace, just to conform to a convention which did not interest them sufficiently to dispose them to challenge or resist it. If the Oath is, in future, to be a bulwark of Theism, it must be a very different thing indeed from what it has been. And this, we think, even the House of Lords must recognise, should they feel disposed to throw out the Affirmation Bill. The only thing to be said in favour of the aban- donment of the retrospective clause is this,—that incom- plete justice speedily granted is often a great deal better than complete justice long deferred ; and that the abandonment of the retrospective clause will undoubtedly make the Bill a great deal easier to pass, though not so complete a satis- faction of the political justice of the case when once it is passed.
Previous page
