His laugh over these things was entirely genial. At no period of his struggle, and on no provocation, did he ever show a touch of that general embitterment which so many men feel towards society on the strength of an ill-usage either imaginary or trifling in comparison with what he underwent. But the wrongers, as always, could not forgive. There was no slackening in the output of Conservative defamation, the device of saddling Bradlaugh's Atheism on the Gladstone Government being too congenial to be abandoned. As Lord Henry Lennox had put it in an inspired but unguarded moment, it was felt to be good Tory policy to "put that damned Bradlaugh on them." Sir Hardinge Giffard (now Lord Halsbury) publicly and falsely asserted in November that before the election the Liberal whip, Mr Adam, had written to the Northampton electors, asking them to return Bradlaugh; going on to add that this step "had never been disavowed or disapproved by the Liberal leaders"--an extremity of false witness memorable as coming from a man who was soon to be made Lord Chancellor. Such a lead was of course zealously followed. And the average upper-class Liberal, while reluctantly voting with the Government in the matter, indemnified himself by insolence to the man over whom the trouble had arisen. There are always in the Liberal party men loyal to it as a faction, while caring little for its principles in themselves, and bearing small goodwill to those more advanced adherents who give pause to the weaker brethren. This state of mind may account for the gratuitous offensiveness, though hardly for the inaccuracy, of one utterance by Mr Marjoribanks (now Lord Tweedmouth) in an address to his constituents at Duns in November 1880:-- "It was in his opinion a great pity that the electors of Northampton should have elected a man to be their representative whose views, moral, religious, and social, were such as were Mr Bradlaugh's specialty, and not only his specialty, but his means of subsisting. (Applause.) It was a pity, too, that when Mr Bradlaugh had been elected he had not followed the example of far greater men, such as Mill and Hume, who were to some extent sharers in his beliefs, or rather his disbeliefs, but who had quietly gone to the table and taken the oath, and said no more about it. Then, again, it was a pity that when Mr Bradlaugh claimed to affirm, he was not at once allowed to do so at his own risk. Of one thing, however, he was perfectly sure, and that was, that the House of Commons was perfectly right in the distinct and peremptory refusal which Mr Bradlaugh's demand to take the oath met when it was ultimately made."