as overbearing. It was a point of honour with him to give a hearing in his columns to all manner of opposition to his own views; and no man was ever less apt to let his philosophical convictions bias him in his practical or political relations with people of another way of thinking. Hence he was able not only to follow, but to follow with a chivalrous devotion, such a political leader as Mr Gladstone, of whose latter writings on religious matters he found it difficult to speak without a sense of humorous humiliation.[106] But his political teaching must be separately considered. [Footnote 106: His comment on Mr Gladstone's reply to Colonel Ingersoll is, however, a model of respectful exposure of a very bad case.] CHAPTER II. POLITICAL DOCTRINE AND WORK. § 1. In combining the propaganda of Freethought with that of Republican Radicalism, Bradlaugh was carrying on the work begun in England by Paine, and continued by Richard Carlile, men whose memory he honoured for those qualities of courage, sincerity, and constancy which were the pith of his own character. The bringing of reason to bear at once on the things of Church and of State, of creed and of conduct, was for him a matter of course, as it has been for the great majority of Atheists, from Holbach onwards, and he held firmly to the old conviction that for free and rational men the only right form of Government is a Republic. He had all Paine's energetic disdain of the monarchic principle in theory and in practice, and, coming to his work in the latter half of the century, he could stand up for Republicanism without incurring the extreme penalties which fell so heavily on the devoted head of Carlile that his hold of his rationalist doctrine gave way under the strain of his struggle, the mind seeking lethargic rest before the body found the final repose. Still the great reaction against the French Revolution, which had made the name of Paine a byword, and the life of Carlile a series of imprisonments, was still far too strong in the fifties and sixties to permit of an avowed Republican and Atheist being regarded without horror by the middle and upper classes. The more famous Carlyle, with all his loud esteem for sincerity and louder repudiation of cant, never dreamt of saying a plain word against the monarchy any more than against the current religion, though his political theories were at all times as far asunder from current monarchism as from democracy. He even went out of his way to speak smoothly of a royalty which did nothing. For a generation to which Carlyle figured as outspoken and veridical, therefore, anything so practical as Republicanism was wildly revolutionary, and so Bradlaugh figured from the first to the average imagination as a violent politician.