THE LATE JOHN BRIGHT.

Our cablegrams this morning announce the death of Mr. John Bright. On the 23rd of April, 1866, when Earl Russell's Parliamentary Reform Bill was being debated in the House of Commons, the member for Birmingham made use of the following words:—"The political gains of the last 25 years are my political gains, if they can be called the gains in any degree of any living Englishman. The policy I have urged upon the House and upon the country, so far as it has hitherto been accepted by Parliament, is a policy conservative of the public welfare, strengthening the just authority of Parliament, and adding from day to day fresh lustre and dignity to the Crown." Not a man among those 815 who defeated that Bill only to get a Conservative household suffrage measure a little later, could deny the truth of that honest boast, for its proof was to be found in the pages of Hansard, and in the statute-book of the realm. Nearly another quarter of a century has passed since then, and over the grave of John Bright all England admits to-day that from the hour he first entered public life he has been one of the boldest, most consistent, most progressive, wisest, and truest statesmen England has ever had. To millions of British subjects, their native land has been a happier home for the life and labours of John Bright, and that name has been, and will long continue to be, a tower of strength to all lovers of justice and freedom in every part of the world.

BRIGHT AND COBDEN.

The friendship between Bright and Cobden, is one of the most beautiful and touching chapters of political history. Their first meeting was in Mr. Cobden's counting-house at Manchester, where Mr. Bright had gone to seek help for a public meeting at Rochdale on the question of education in 1888. On the 10th of January, 1889, the Anti-Corn Law Association was started at Manchester, quickly altered to " The League," and Mr. Bright's first recorded speech on the question of repeal was delivered at Rochdale on the 2nd of February of that year. Soon after he lost his first wife, and his friend paid him a visit of condolence, which has been very beautifully narrated by the subject of it :—

" I was in Leamington, and Mr. Cobden called on me. I was then in the depth of grief—I may almost say of despair, for the light and sunshine of my house had been extinguished. All that was left on earth of my young wife, except the memory of a sainted life and a too brief happiness, was lying still and cold in the chamber above us. Mr. Cobden called on me as his friend, and addressed me, as you may suppose, with words of condolence. After a time he looked up and said, ' There are thousands and thousands of homes in England at this moment where wives and mothers and children are dying of hunger. Now, when the first paroxysm of your grief is passed, I would advise you to come with me, and we will never rest until the corn laws are repealed.' "

That was in 1841, when Cobden was in his 37th year, and Bright in his 30th. The union then formed was unbroken till death severed it 24 years later, and its effect upon public affairs in England can scarcely be overestimated. The elder of these founders of the Manchester school of politics obtained a seat in Parliament for Stockport in this same year, 1841, and when he made his first speech in the House, Bright sat in the gallery, next to Horace Twiss, of the Times, who listened intently to every word, and said at the close, " Nothing in him; he is only a barker." The wish was father to the thought, for the Times was one of the last of the metropolitan papers to be converted to free trade, and seemed incapable of forgiving its own conversion as long as the man lived who did more than any other to make it necessary. Other London papers were already advocating a repeal of the corn laws, such as the Athenæum, the Sun, Spectator, Dispatch, Planet, Morning Chronicle, Morning Advertiser, Globe, Examiner, Patriot, Charter, and Weekly True Sun, and of the country papers some of the most widely circulated were beginning to take the same side.

ENTERS PARLIAMENT.

In April, 1843, it was thought desirable that Mr. Bright should contest Durham against the influential aristocratic family who held that constituency almost as a pocket borough. He polled 405 votes against 507 recorded for Lord Dungannon. A few weeks later the winning candidate was unseated for bribery, and in July of the same year Mr. Bright was elected by 488 votes against 410 given for his opponent. The result was hailed as a victory for the League all over the kingdom ; and, within 24 hours of the news reaching London, 6000 people assembled in the Crown and Anchor rooms to congratulate the victor, and thank the constituency he had emancipated by the power of his oratory and the force of his arguments alone. He took his seat, and made the Friends' declaration, instead of taking the oath, on the 28th July. Ten days later he delivered his maiden Parliamentary speech on a motion by Mr. Ewart, bearing on free trade, when he was thus depicted by one who was present:—

" As a speaker Mr. Bright is far superior to many who are listened to in that assembly; but those who know the constitution of the House know also the great influence of station, name, and wealth, and how much dulness will be tolerated from one of a good family. Mr. Bright is about the middle size, rather firmly and squarely built, with a fair, clear complexion, and an intelligent and pleasing expression of countenance. His voice is good, his enunciation distinct, and his delivery free from any unpleasant peculiarity or mannerism. He is young, and has apparently a long career before him. His dress is rather more recherche than that of the Friends of a generation back, differing but slightly from the ordinary costume of the day."

BRIGHT'S CONTEMPORARIES.

Sir Robert Peel was then in the second year of his second Administration, destined to remain in office for nearly three years longer, and signalise it by the most sweeping commercial and financial reform known in the history of England. He too was a Lancashire man, like Cobden and Bright, and in this, his last, Administration he had for his Vice-President of the Board of Trade, and afterwards Secretary of State for the Colonies, another Lancashire man, destined to a great career—William Ewart Gladstone, the real author of Peel's Budget schemes, and of the liberal commercial policy which swept away duties on over 1200 articles between 1841 and 1846, leaving the British Customs tariff very much what it is now—the least burdensome and the freest in the world. Gladstone had been eight years in Parliament, with the exception of a brief interval, when Bright was returned for Durham, although he was only two years older ; and his future political rival, Mr. Disraeli, then 89, had been six years in the House, with a great reputation as a writer of amusing fiction, but with small prospect of attaining the position of Conservative leader he was destined to fill. Of the other leading men, there were, on the Government side, Lord Aberdeen, the future head of the Peelites, in his 60th year ; Lord Lyndhurst, in his 71st year; Sir James Graham, in his 51st, with a high character for political sagacity and a tendency to Liberal measures ; and at the back of the Ministry, with an almost regal influence, stood the veteran Duke of Wellington, at the age of 74, supporting Peel with all his might, fearful of sudden changes, but ready for wise reforms, as he had been when his Administration carried Catholic Emancipation. The Whigs were rich in able leaders, at the maturity of their powers ; Palmerston, fashionable and dashing still at 59, scarcely looked upon as grave and reliable enough for the highest place; Russell, 10 years younger, but in character a quarter of a century older; Clarendon, a still younger man, but skilled in diplomacy; and Granville, the rising hope of the Leveson-Gowers, then only 38, but already proved in office. How time has scattered these names, and transferred them to different camps in the political wars of the last 40 years.

THE FREE TRADE CONTROVERSY.

The free-trade controversy, like the spear of Ithuriel, was the talisman which made each reveal his true form and tendency, and from that date English politics enter upon a new phase. Not the least of the good done by the league was the creation and circulation of a mass of popular literature which found its way into every home, and made the working men of England better informed on industrial questions than average members of Parliament had been previously. Up to 1848 £97,814 had been subscribed for carrying on the work of the league. Cobden had given a site for the Manchester Free Trade Hall, and which, by singular coincidence, happened to be the very spot where the " Peterloo '' massacre had been perpetrated : the Anti-Corn Law Circular had risen to a circulation of 29,000 copies weekly, the largest circulation of any newspaper in England at that date, with the single exception of the Weekly Dispatch, and nine million copies of tracts had been issued from the head office. Meetings were organised in every chief town, and agricultural as well as manufacturing centre, throughout the kingdom ; the Protectionists were met and discomfited in the presence of their own tenants, and in one season Bright attended 30 of these meetings, and Cobden 31, besides an immense amount of writing, gratuitously contributed to the cause of the league by both of them. Fourteen paid lecturers had also been sent to enlighten the public all over the land, and in September, 1843, the Covent Garden Theatre was secured for 50 nights, at a cost of £3000 for a series of public meetings in support of the repeal of the corn laws and free trade in general. It has sometimes been contended that the league sought mainly the removal of the bread-tax, and cared little for general free trade.

The following extract from the speech of Mr. Bright at the first meeting in Covent Garden
Theatre on the 28th September, 1843, will sufficiently show how broad and far-seeing were the views of trade he was helping to get recognised in the legislation of the country :—

" As England was the greatest trading nation in the world, so freetrade would benefit her most. She was the most commercial country, because she possessed the greatest powers of production and consumption, and by production and consumption, which rendered exchange a necessity, the trade of the world was carried on. They wanted to have the question settled for the world as well as for England. They were tired of what were called the natural divisions of Empires. They wanted not that the Channel should separate this country from France—they hoped and wished that Frenchmen and Englishmen should no longer consider each other as naturally hostile nations. It was common to speak of rivers and mountains and seas as the natural divisions of countries, separating one nation from another, from all time, and for all time ; but there was no barrier which nature had reared which was a thousandth part so detrimental to the interests of mankind, or so much calculated to embitter their feelings and promote hostilities, as were those miserable and unnatural barriers which legal restrictions on trade had imposed, and which were upheld by lines of Custom-houses between nation and nation."

BRIGHT'S FELLOW-LABOURERS.

It is but fair to give credit to the early pioneers of the doctrines the Manchester men were now beginning to champion with so much energy, skill, and perseverance. Adam Smith had laid the foundation for a sounder political economy in his " Wealth of Nations ;" Colonel Perronet Thompson's "Corn Law Catechism." published in 1827, and reissued in a sixpenny edition in 1840, was invaluable ; Ebenezer Elliott's " Corn Law Rhymes" came out between 1831 and 1846, the first volume " printed by order of the Sheffield Mechanics' Anti Bread-Tax Society," an organisation which took the field several years earlier than the league ; nor must the labours of William Cobbett, Joseph Hume, and Arthur Roebuck be forgotten ; and still less the untiring annual attempts of the Hon. Charles Pelham Villiers to force the corn-law grievance upon the attention of Parliament. The accession of Cobden and Bright to the House of Commons gave new life to the cause which they had made popular throughout England. " These two orators," says Mr. Kinglake, "had shown with what a strength, with what a masterly skill, with what patience, with what a high courage they could carry a scientific truth through the storms of politics. They had shown that they could arouse and govern the assenting thousands who listened to them with delight, that they could bend the House of Commons, that they could press their creed upon a Prime Minister, and put upon his mind so hard a stress that, after a while, he felt it to be a torture and a violence to his reason to have to make a stand against them." The year 1845 will long remain a dark memory for Ireland, for then the potato crop, the staple food of the people, was rotting in the ground. "Famine," said Mr. Bright 20 years later, "famine, against which we had warred, joined us;" and Sir Robert Peel announced, as soon as Parliament met, "I will not withhold the homage which is due to the progress of reason and of truth by denying that my opinions on the subject of protection have undergone a change." Lord John Russell also became a convert, and he told the city of London, which he then represented, that the corn laws were " the blight of commerce, the bane of agriculture, the source of bitter divisions among classes ; the cause of penury, fever, mortality, and crime among the people." The Duke of Wellington, along with Lord Stanley, hesitated, but at last said " A good Government for the country is more important than corn laws or any other consideration, and I will support Sir Robert Peel's Administration." The Times announced on the 4th December the decision of the Cabinet. It was fiercely contradicted, but on the 6th the leading journal added—" We adhere to our original announcement that Parliament will meet early in January, and that a repeal of the corn late will be proposed in one House by Sir R. Peel, and in the other by the Duke of Wellington." But Lord Stanley and the Duke of Buccleuch threatened to resign, and Peel resigned himself the day before the Times repeated its announcement Lord John Russell was sent for, but Lord Grey could not sit in the Cabinet which proposed the fiery Palmerston for Foreign Secretary, and he also wanted Cobden for a colleague, to which the great Whig families would not consent, and Peel had to come back, as he said, " like a man restored to life after his funeral sermon had been preached." His speech on the address at the opening of Parliament contained the famous sentence that he found it. " No easy task to ensure the harmonious and united action of an ancient monarchy, a proud aristocracy, and a reformed House of Commons." The man who replied to that speech was not the leader of the Opposition, but Benjamin Disraeli, who became from that day leader of the Tory squires. But the Government triumphed on the 25th of June, 1846, the very day on which the Ministry were overthrown, ostensibly on an Irish Coercion Bill in the Commons, but in reality by the passionate thirst for vengeance which inflamed the Tory squires. The closing words of the great Minister's speech on leaving office for the last time :—"I shall leave a name execrated by every monopolist, who, from less honourable motives, clamours for protection, because it conduces to his own individual benefit; but it may be that I shall also leave a name sometimes remembered with expressions of goodwill in the abodes of those whose lot it is to labour and to earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow, when they shall recruit their exhausted strength with abundant and untaxed food, the sweeter because it is no longer leavened by a sense of injustice."

IRELAND.

Next to his speeches on free trade, some of the earliest and most striking made by Mr. Bright in Parliament were upon the state of Ireland and matters of Irish administration. On the 16th April, 1845, he spoke against the grant of £26,000 per annum to the Roman Catholic College of Maynooth, not from any sympathy with " Protestant acendancy," but because he was opposed to the system of State endowments of religion " for any purpose, under any circumstances, at any time whatever." In 1847 he was returned for Manchester, and continued to represent that constituency for 10 years. On the 18th December, 1847, he first proposed in Parliament his remedy for the chronic distress and disaffection in Ireland—the free sale of land, and the abolition of the laws of entail and primogeniture. " Perhaps I shall be told," he said, " that the laws of entail and primogeniture are necessary for the maintenance of our aristocratic institutions; but if the evils of Ireland spring from this source, I say perish your aristocratic institutions rather than that a whole nation should be in this terrible condition. If your aristocratic families would rear up their children in habits of business, and with some notions of duty and prudence,these mischievous arrangements would not be required, and they would retain in their possession estates at least as large as is compatible with the interests of the rest of the community." Every session, for many years, he reiterated those opinions on Ireland in bold and eloquent language, which gradually told upon the Liberal party, and obtained some recognition in legislation.

ELECTORAL REFORM

Mr. Bright commenced that agitation for electoral reform which was not over until a bill was passed in 1867, which was virtual household suffrage for all the boroughs of the United Kingdom. Four Governments were used up before the question was settled, including the 6½ years' administration of Lord Palmerston, who was regarded, in his later years, as the greatest obstacle to reform of all British statesmen. Mr.Bright addressed scores of meetings out of doors, in addition to his powerful Parliamentary oratory, and for years he may be said to have kept the agitation alive almost single-handed. The defeat of the Russell-Gladstone Government on their Reform Bill of 1866 was the real crisis of the struggle. The secession from the Liberal ranks at that time was a memorable incident of the campaign, and Mr. Bright's ridicule of it was the most withering and amusing "within the memory of the oldest member." Speaking of Mr. Horsman he said, " The right honorable gentleman is the first of the new party who has expressed his great grief, who has retired into what may be called his political Cave of Adullam, and he has called about him every one that was in distress and every one that was discontented.'' Referring to the union of "two men so amiable, so discreet " as Mr. Lowe and Mr. Horsman, both proverbial for their crotchets and irritability, Mr. Bright continued " There is one difficulty which it is impossible to remove. This party of two reminds me of the Scotch terrier, which was so covered with hair that you could not tell which was the head and which was the tail." Continuing his reply to Mr. Lowe, he said—" The right honorable gentleman told us of the polypus, which takes its colour from the rock on which it lives, and be said that some honorable members take their colours from their constituencies. The constituency which the right honorable gentleman represents consists of 174 men, seven of whom are working men ; but the real constituent of the right honorable gentleman is a member of the other House of Parliament, and as he could send in his butler or his groom instead of the right honorable gentleman to represent the borough. I think in one sense—regarding the right, honorable gentleman as an intellectual gladiator in this House—we are much indebted to the Marquis of Lansdowne that he did not do that." This was not only a most effective reply to Mr. Lowe, but also a powerful argument for electoral reform. All England rang with it for months, and it is said " the grimmest Derbyites in the House laughed as heartily as the youngest country squires."

THE AMERICAN WAR.

The views enunciated by Mr. Bright on the American war and the United States generally exposed him to much opprobrium among the Tory and leading Whig families, but won him much favour with the bulk of the people on both sides of the Atlantic. He was equally a champion for the rights of Ireland, once using the strong expression, " If Ireland were unmoored from her fastenings in the deep, and floated 2000 miles to the westward, those things which we propose to do would have been done by the people of Ireland themselves ; and if they had become a State of the American Republic under the constitution of that country these things would have been done." On October 30, 1866, he was banqueted at Dublin, and on November 2 an address of the Trades was presented to him in that city ; but his oratory was less appreciated by Hibernian palates than the semi incendiary declamations of O'connell and the repealers. In May of 1868 the Disraeli Government was defeated on Gladstone's Irish Church resolutions, and the Premier told the House of Commons that he had advised her Majesty to dissolve Parliament, but at the same time had tendered the resignation of Ministers. This led to a fierce debate, during which Mr. Bright said, " Any man in this country who puts the Sovereign in the front of a great struggle like this, into which, it may be, we are about to enter, who points to the Irish people and says from the floor of this House, 'Your Queen holds the flag under which we, the enemies of religious equality and justice to Ireland are marshalled,' I say that the Minister who does this is guilty of a very high crime and a great misdemeanour against his Sovereign and against his country."

MISCELLANEOUS LEGISLATION.

The legislation accomplished by the Gladstone Ministry during its term of five years and two months is too well known to need description here. They disestablished and disendowed the Irish Church; they carried an Irish Land Bill which did much good for Ireland, and failed of more because the Lords had made it largely inoperative ; they abolished purchase in the army, they re-organised the Admiralty, and effected great reforms and retrenchments in the public departments ; they carried an Education Bill which, in spite of some defects, has proved one of the most beneficial measures ever conferred upon the people of England. Mr. Bright had to retire for a while on account of illness; but he contributed to the success of most of these measures, by his speeches and his influence as much as any man in the country, with the single exception of his chief, Mr. Gladstone. He had to absent himself from Parliament for nearly two years, spending much of his time at Llandudno, in North Wales, and in Scotland, where the pursuit of salmon fishing in the Highland rivers proved health-giving to his enfeebled constitution. When he reappeared in Parliament and took office again under Mr. Gladstone as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, we are told " his hair, which before his illness was dark or grizzled and abundant, had become perfectly white and thin, imparting, together with his florid complexion, a venerable appearance." The dread of him felt by the wealthier classes during his earlier years gradually disappeared, while the great cities vied with each other in doing him honour, Edinburgh presented him with its freedom, Glasgow University made him its Lord Rector, the Sovereign and Royal Family of England entertained for him the highest personal respect, President Hayes invited him to become a national guest at Washington, and the Liberal party throughout the world mentioned his name with veneration and hope as the watchword of liberty, progress, and universal equity.

MR. BRIGHT'S RESIGNATION.

 

One of the most important political speeches of the period, about the close of 1888, was his address at Keighley, on December 14. He had been taunted with becoming Conservative in his old age, on account of his views on the question of forty-shilling freeholders and property qualifications generally. His rejoinder was that the English constitution was not based on, and never aimed at, the principle of universal suffrage ; and that the aim of every reformer who was not at heart a revolutionist should be to enlarge the existing basis of the constitution, and not to substitute some alien foundation. His speech at Birmingham in January, 1885, on old and new Radicalism, was accepted as an evidence by the press organs of his own party, that he was not in touch with modern Radicalism, and this feeling gained ground among the more extreme members of the party, with subsequent utterances of Mr. Bright. When the break in the Liberal party over Mr. Gladstone's Home Rule proposals occurred, Mr. Bright was found on the side of the Marquis of Hartington, Mr. Chamberlain, and the rest of the Unionist Liberals, and this attitude he continued to occupy until the end. He defined his position in an address to the electors of the Central Division of Birmingham in June, 1886, firmly disapproving of the establishment of two legislative assemblies in the United Kingdom, believing that " no Irish Parliament can be as powerful and as just in Ireland as the United Parliament sitting in Westminster." The subsequent career of Mr. John Bright has not been illustrated by any leading incident. For some time past his activity has given place to the quietude of riper years and, honourable age, and younger men have filled the space he once claimed as his own in the public eye. Now that the end has come, his work is on all sides pronounced to be well done, and he leaves behind him the record of years full of honourable service.

ORATORY.

The first thing which brought that name into prominence was the matchless oratory of this man of the people, and to the last this oratory continued to be the main source of his power. It was like the man himself, simple, natural, pure as virgin snow; full of common sense, strong in argument, sparkling with humour, rich with Scriptural incident and exquisite poetical quotations, wonderfully apposite ; brimming over with kindly sympathy for everything right and true ; sometimes swelling with tones of righteous indignation, and at others trembling with pathos for the suffering and pity for the oppressed. He lacked Disraeli's wealth of epigram and polished repartee ; he had not Gladstone's immense erudition, sustained power of logical elaboration, or masterly grasp of both principles and details in a great argument But for the effective utterance of truths which stir the hearts of an assembly of men, and go right home to the soul of a nation, England has never had a greater orator than John Bright. His style is Saxon of the best type, purified from its archaicisms; and his published speeches are as fine specimens of strong, pure English, and at the same time of forcible and courteous political discussion, as can be found in our language. What he said in the middle of his career in 1866, he could say with redoubled force at its close in 1889—"The political gains of the last 25 years are my political gains, if they can be called the gains in any degree of any living Englishman." The Church founded by George Fox, and fostered by William Penn, never had a truer representative, nor Christianity a more conscientious exemplar, nor England a braver, honester subject, nor humanity a sincerer friend, than the untitled and undecorated, but stainless, British Commoner, John Bright. His name will live in history as long as the English language lives, and when the political calumny he had almost completely lived down is utterly forgotten, the good he did will shine forth in purer lustre, sacred in the gratitude of millions of mankind.

The Sydney Morning Herald 28 March 1889,