The limbs barely sustained him....
The Trafalgar Square phrase that this man might be broken but not bent occurred to minds apprehensive at the present appearance of him." They flung him out, and swift, short words were there interchanged.

"I nearly did wrong at the door," he said afterwards, "I was very angry.
I said to Inspector Denning, 'I shall come again with force enough to overcome it,' He said, 'When ?' I said, 'Within a minute if I raise my hand.'" He stood in Palace Yard, and there outside the gate was a vast sea of heads, the men who had journeyed from all parts of England for love of him, and in defence of the great right he represented of a constituency to send to Parliament the man of its choice.

Ah! he was never greater than in that moment of outrage and of triumphant wrong; with all the passion of a proud man surging within him, insulted by physical violence, injured by the cruel wrenching of all his muscles--so that for weeks his arms had to be swathed in bandages--he was never greater than when he conquered his own wrath, crushed down his own longing for battle, stirred to flame by the bodily struggle, and the bodily injury, and with thousands waiting within sound of his voice, longing to leap to his side, he gave the word to tell them to meet him that evening away from the scene of conflict, and meanwhile to disperse quietly, "no riot, no disorder." But how he suffered mentally no words of mine may tell, and none can understand how it wrung his heart who does not know how he reverenced the great Parliament of England, how he honoured law, how he believed in justice being done; it was the breaking down of his national ideals, of his pride in his country, of his belief that faith would be kept with a foe by English gentlemen, who with all their faults, he thought, held honour and chivalry dear.

"No man will sleep in gaol for me to-night," he said to me that day; "no woman can blame me for her husband killed or wounded, but--" A wave of agony swept over his face, and from that fatal day Charles Bradlaugh was never the same man.
Some hold their ideals lightly, but his heart-strings were twined round his; some care little for their country--he was an Englishman, law-abiding, liberty-loving, to his heart's core, of the type of the seventeenth-century patriot, holding England's honour dear.

It was the treachery that broke his heart; he had gone alone, believing in the honour of his foes, ready to submit to expulsion, to imprisonment, and it was the latter that he expected; but he never dreamed that, going alone amongst his foes, they would use brutal and cowardly violence, and shame every Parliamentary tradition by personal outrage on a duly-elected member, outrage more worthy of a slum pot-house than of the great Commons House, the House of Hampden and of Vane, the House that had guarded its own from Royal violence, and had maintained its privileges in the teeth of kings.
These stormy scenes brought about a promise of Government aid; Mr.
Bradlaugh failed to get any legal redress, as, indeed, he expected to fail, on the ground that the officials of the House were covered by the House's order, but the Government promised to support his claim to his seat during the next session, and thus prevented the campaign against them on which we had resolved.