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h carried his case before Lord Chief Justice
Bovill and Justices Keating, Brett, and Montague Smith, in the Court of
Common Pleas; but after half-an-hour's argument the Judges refused to
hear him on the ground that he was not moving on affidavit. "That is,"
said Mr Bradlaugh, "I was sent back to be sworn as to the refusal of
my testimony before I could be allowed to argue that I was not liable
to take the oath, and before I could be allowed to claim that I had,
notwithstanding, the right to give evidence." A very pretty tangle of
contradiction!

He then proceeded to satisfy all conventions by swearing (affidavits
could not then be affirmed) that Mr Prentice did not consider him
competent to give evidence on oath, nor himself competent to receive
the evidence on affirmation. Mr Bradlaugh returned two days later to
the Court of Common Pleas and asked that "Mr Prentice be directed to
take the evidence of Mr Charles Bradlaugh on the fact to be stated in a
special case." After a very long argument the Court decided that it had
no power to give directions to an arbitrator.

Although no more advanced than when he first brought his action in the
winter of 1867, Mr Bradlaugh did not even yet despair, but determined
to carry his case to the highest possible legal tribunal. Pending the
final decision of the law, petitions were got up all over the country
and sent into Parliament, praying for a further amendment of the Act.

On the 7th of February the case was mentioned at the Sittings in Error;
but although there were seven judges present, Lord Chief Baron Kelly
refused to proceed with it in the absence of the Lord Chief Justice. He
said that the case was one "of the greatest possible importance, not
only in this country, but throughout all Europe; it was therefore of
importance that the Court should be so constituted as to insure general
satisfaction with its decision. The Lord Chief Justice Cockburn had
been present when an argument on part of the case had been heard; it
would be advisable, therefore, that the case should stand over until
the Sittings in Error after the next term."

In consequence of this, it was not until the 16th of May that
the long-drawn-out proceedings in this suit--involving at the
outset a simple business transaction, but now including far wider
issues--entered upon their final stage. For more than two years justice
had been persistently perverted from its course, and used as the tool
of fraud, but now at length matters wore a different aspect. The case
was heard in the Court of Exchequer Chamber, before Lord Chief Justice
Cockburn, Lord Chief Baron Kelly, Justices Blackburn, Mellor, and
Lush, and Barons Channell and Cleasby. The Court was unanimous in its
decision that the endorsee was entitled to sue, and that the verdict
must be entered for Mr Bradlaugh. The Lord Chief Justice remarked that
the defendant had no merits at all in the case; he had relied upon this
"somewhat unrighteous" defence, and the judgment now given was "in
accordance with the good sense and justice and equity in the case."

So, in the end, my father won his suit, but the victory was very
costly. The judgment of the Court of Exchequer did not entitle him
to recover any of the expenses he had incurred in fighting the oath
question. Upon that point the decision of the Court of Common Pleas was
final. In a public statement made at the end of the year at Bristol,
in reply to some observations which had fallen from Professor Newman,
Mr Bradlaugh remarked that in contesting the oath question in the law
courts he had himself lost £1500. This was an allusion to his losses in
the De Rin case, the costs in which alone reached to more than £1100;
in addition to these enormous costs, he lost his debt of £360 because
the Christian De Rin, who objected to the evidence of an Atheist,
became bankrupt when the case was finally decided.

Before the passing of the Evidence Amendment Act in 1869 all persons
who disbelieved in God or in a future state of rewards and punishments
were held to be incompetent to give evidence in a Court of Law.
Freethinkers had long and bitterly felt the injustice and hardship of
their position; and in 1868 and 1869, after the first action in the
case of Bradlaugh and De Rin, a most determined effort was made to move
Parliament to amend the law of evidence. The National Secular Society
sent in petitions to the House of Commons, and the Executive of that
Society put itself in communication with members of both Houses. Mr
Bradlaugh said in 1870 that they tried "to pass a much more distinct
clause in favour of Freethinkers than the one as it now stands,
which is in its legal effect entirely different from the clause as
originally drawn by the Hon. Mr Denman, and printed in the Bill first
read before the Commons. It is Lord Cairns to whom we were ultimately
indebted for the main words which really serve us in the Act of 1869."

In 1870 another Bill, prepared by the Hon. G. Denman and Mr Locke King,
was passed through Parliament to further amend the law of evidence, but
it only met such difficulties as had arisen in the case of Bradlaugh
and De Rin, and did not touch the law as it related to jurymen,
affidavits, or Scotland. Mr Bradlaugh was continually urging members
of the House to get these points amended, but nothing further was done
until he himself carried his Oaths Act of 1888, by which the whole law
relating to oaths was radically altered.

Until the passing of this Act, jurors without religious belief were
liable to be committed to prison if they refused to be sworn, and
the law did not permit them to affirm. Affidavits on interlocutory
proceedings could only be made upon oath. In Scotland all Atheists
and disbelievers in eternal torment were, in addition, incompetent as
witnesses.

In any case, too much discretion was left to the Judge, who was
supposed to satisfy himself, according to the monstrous formula laid
down by the Act, that the oath would have "no binding effect" upon
the conscience of a heretical witness. A promise is binding upon the
conscience of an honest man in whatever form it may be made, and it
put Freethinkers in an entirely false position to be obliged to assent
to the statement that some particular form was not binding upon them.
Conscientious witnesses who wished to affirm hardly knew what to answer
when the Judge put the question to them, and he would not always be
satisfied with the mere statement that the oath gave no additionally
binding effect to the promise. And sometimes his assent to the formula
would be used to the discredit of a witness. I myself once heard Baron
Huddleston tell the jury that it was for them to consider what was the
value of the evidence of a witness whom an oath would not bind.

 * * * * *

Amongst the multitude of papers hostile to Mr Bradlaugh's candidature
for Parliamentary honours in 1868 was one called the _Razor_. This
journal went so far in its condemnatory strictures that Mr Bradlaugh
felt--as his counsel, 

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