The key to Mr. Bradlaugh's character, which unlocks the treasure-house of his excellences and defects, and enables the reader to estimate him justly, is the perception that his one over-riding motive and ceaseless aim was the ascendancy of the right _through him_. It was this passion which inspired his best efforts, and also led to certain aberration of action. But what we have to remember now, and permanently, is that it was ascendancy of the _right_ in political and theological affairs that he mainly sought for, fought for, and vindicated. It is this which will long cause his memory to be cherished. At the time of his death I wrote honouring notices of his career in the _Bradford Observer_ and elsewhere, which were reproduced in other papers. Otherwise, I found opportunity on platforms of showing my estimate of his character and public services. I had never forgotten an act of kindness he had, in an interval of goodwill, done me. When disablement and blindness came in 1876, he collected from the readers of his journal £170 towards a proposed annuity for me. It was a great pleasure to me to repay that kindness by devising means (which others neither thought of nor believed in) of adding thrice that sum to the provision being made for his survivors. It was a merit in him that devotion to pursuits of public usefulness did not, in his opinion, absolve him from keeping a financial promise, as I knew, and have heard friends who aided him testify--a virtue not universal among propagandists. No wonder the coarse environments of his early life lent imperiousness to his manners. In later years, when he was in the society of equals, where masterfulness was less possible and less necessary, he acquired courtesy and a certain dignity--the attribute of conscious power. He was the greatest agitator, within the limits of law, who appeared in my time among the working people. Of his own initiative he incurred no legal danger, and those who followed him were not led into it. He was a daring defender of public right, and not without genius in discovering methods for its attainment. One form of genius lies in discovering developments of a principle which no one else sees. Had he lived in the first French Revolution, he had ranked with Mirabeau and Danton. Had he been with Paine in America, he had spoken "Common Sense" on platforms. He died before being able to show in Parliament the best that was in him. Though he had no College training like Professor Fawcett, Indian lawyers found that Mr. Bradlaugh had a quicker and greater grasp of Indian questions than the Professor. It was no mean distinction--it was, indeed, a distinction any man might be proud to have won--that John Stuart Mill should have left on record, in one of his latest works, his testimony to Mr. Bradlaugh's capacity, which he discerned when others did not. Like Cobbett, the soldiers' barracks did not repress Bradlaugh's invincible passion for the distinction of a political career.