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We hear of a certain case where one of Bradlaugh’s clients had built a brick house on rented ground, without the legal precaution of taking a ninety-nine-year lease. Naturally, the rapacious landlord–for all landlords are rapacious, I am told–ordered the renter out at the end of the year.

The renter then demanded that the landlord should pay him for his building. This was very foolish on the part of the renter, and revealed a woeful ignorance of common law. Bradlaugh was retained and interviewed the obdurate landlord–for all landlords, I am told, are obdurate as well as rapacious. But all was in vain.

That night Bradlaugh and his client got together a hundred good men and true and carried the house away from chimney to cornerstone, leaving nothing but the cellar.

This legal move was very much like that of Robert Ingersoll, who had a railroad company lay half a mile of track through one of the streets of Peoria, between midnight and sun-up, and then let the opposing party carry the case to the courts.

Ingersoll’s interest in the world of thought cost him the Governorship of the State of Illinois. Bradlaugh’s interest along similar lines cost him the foremost position at the English bar. The man had presence, persistence, courage, and that rapid, ready intellect which commands respect with judge, jury and opposition. Before he was twenty-five he knew history, mythology, poetry, economics and theology in a way that few men do who spend a lifetime in research.

Public speaking opens up the mental pores as no other form of intellectual exercise does. It inspires, stimulates, and calls out the reserves. Perhaps the best result of oratory is in that it reveals a man’s ignorance to himself and shows him how little he knows, thus urging him to reinforce his stores and prepare for a siege.

All this, of course, does not apply to clergymen whose efforts are purely “ex parte,” and where a reply on the part of the pew is considered an offense.

Wendell Phillips advised the young oratorical aspirant to take “a course of mobs.” Most certainly Bradlaugh did, and then he continued to take post-graduate courses. His Donnybrook experiences were simply prophetic.

The crowds at Hyde Park who came to hear him speak were not actuated wholly by a desire to hear the answer to Pilate’s question.

Bradlaugh had his own corner in the Park where he spoke on Sunday mornings, when the weather was pleasant. At this meeting he invited replies, so the proceeding usually took the form of a debate. And he had a way of enlivening in a similar manner the service of his friends the enemy. Often the audience, for pure love of mischief, would start pushing, and two hundred hoodlums would overrun the meeting. There was no special violence about it–it is very English, you know. Occasionally it happens yet in Hyde Park, and the true London Bobby, who never sees anything he does not want to see, allows the beefeaters to crowd, jostle, and push themselves tired. It was really all very funny unless you were caught in the pushing crowd, then all you could do was to keep on your feet and go with the merry mass. But the attendance at Hyde Park meetings was increasing, and in the rough- house, at times, some one would fall and be trampled upon.

So an order was issued from Scotland Yard that all public speaking in the parks should cease between ten o’clock in the morning and two in the afternoon. This was during church hours, for church attendance had begun to fall off very perceptibly.

Bradlaugh thought the order was without due process of law–that the parks belonged to the people, and that public speaking in the open was not an abuse of the people’s rights. More people than ever flocked to Hyde Park on the Sunday set for the fray. Bradlaugh arranged that a dozen or more of his colleagues should begin to speak at the same time in different parts of the park. The police began to charge and the crowds began to push. Then the police used their truncheons. Two policemen seized Bradlaugh. He politely asked them to keep their hands off, and when they did not he showed them his quality by wresting their truncheons from them, and flinging them to the cheering crowd. He then bumped the heads of the officers together, inciting riot, so ran the records.