Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament. John Morrison Davidson

Board of Trade. In 1843 he became President of the Board, and for the first time his wonderful genius as an administrator had full scope. In 1845 he resigned office rather than be a party to adding to the endowments of the Romanist college of Maynooth, Ireland, which he had condemned in his work on "Church and State." Shiel wittily remarked that "the statesman had been sacrificed to the author." In point of fact, his resignation is a standing rebuke to those who have basely accused him of place-hunting.

      From this time onwards Mr. Gladstone exhibited, in increasing measure and in numerous ways, his leaning towards Liberal opinions. Canningite and Oxford influences began to lose their hold over him. "I trace," he said at Oxford in December, 1878, "in the ​education of Oxford of my own time one great defect. Perhaps the fault was mine: but I must admit that I did not learn, when at Oxford, that which I have learned since; viz., to set a due value on the imperishable and inestimable principles of human liberty." In the budget of 1845 he defended a proposal to put slave-grown sugar on a less favorable footing than free; and, when the corn-law question became a "burning" one, he resigned his seat for Newark because of the anti-repeal views of the Duke of Newcastle. His powerful pen was, however, at the service of the repealers; and, when the battle was fought and won, he was returned in 1847 for the University of Oxford. He was still, of course, nominally a Tory; but one of his first acts was to support the removal of Jewish disabilities, to the confusion of many of those whose "rising hope" he was still supposed to be. In the session of 1849 he made a powerful speech in favor of the reform of our colonial policy, from which much benefit has indirectly flowed to the colonies.

      In 1851 "circumstances purely domestic" took him to Naples, and there his humanity was stirred to its very core by the unheard-of brutalities of King Bomba. His passionate cry for redress resounded throughout the civilized world: "I have seen and heard the strong and true expression used, 'This is the negation of God erected into a system of government.'" For once Lord Palmerston was on the side of justice, and the sword of Garibaldi eventually wrought out for the Neapolitans the just vengeance which Mr. Gladstone had invoked on their tyants.

      In the administration of 1859, Mr. Gladstone, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, was instrumental in the ​repeal of the paper duty, and in contracting the commercial treaty with France. Of his remission of taxes and reductions of the national debt, it is unnecessary to speak. They are achievements engraved with an iron pen on the financial records of his country.

      Two great questions, and two only, of his time has he completely misjudged—the Crimean war and the American war. Of the first he was, to some extent, particeps criminis; and, with regard to the latter, a singularly rash and hostile utterance by implication numbered him with the friends of secession. For the former he has atoned by his late almost superhuman efforts to prevent its recurrence; and for the latter there is ample compensation in our wisest international act, the Alabama arbitration. It is no small misfortune that, in the course of his busy life, Mr. Gladstone has never found time to visit the generous land of "our kin beyond the sea." Such an experience would have taught him that it is better to be enshrined in the heart of a great people than to obtain the favor of all the courts and courtiers in Christendom.

      Of the mighty impulse which he gave to the movement which ended in household suffrage being conferred on "our own flesh and blood," of the imperishable achievements of his ministry of 1868 in passing the Ballot Act and the Education Act, in abolishing purchase in the army, and, above all, in disestablishing the Church of Ireland and reforming in some measure the land laws of that unhappy country, what need to speak? To no Englishman of our time has it been given to perform such eminent service to his country and to mankind. His Radicalism, commencing to meander more than forty years ago among the stony uplands of ​Toryism, is now, as the limit of life is approached, a majestic river, whose ample flood will never be stinted or stayed till it is lost in the ocean of eternity.

      At the general election of 1874 the British Philistine was fat, and kicked. The constituencies deliberately cried out, "Not this man, but Barabbas!" Is it necessary to add the emphatic, "Now, Barabbas was a robber"? But since then many things, as Earl Beaconsfield would say, have happened. The general election of 1880 reversed the verdict of 1874 with a decisiveness that fairly astonished all parties. In opposition, though no longer ostensible leader of the Liberal host, Mr. Gladstone had evinced a moral grandeur and an intellectual vigor never equalled by any British statesman; and on all hands he was felt to be the man of a very difficult situation, of which the end is not j-et. In proportion as he succeeds or fails will be the nation's gain or loss. In any case, if he has not done enough for humanity—if he has still, as he says, a whole catalogue of "unredeemed pledges" to submit—he has done enough, and more than enough, to enshrine his name imperishably in the hearts of all good men:—

      "His life was gentle; and the elements

       So mixed in him, that Nature might stand up,

       And say to all the world, This was a Man!"

      ​

      John Bright

       Table of Contents

      II

      JOHN BRIGHT.

      Thou art e'en as just a man

       As e'er my conversation coped withal."

      THERE is a quaint passage in "Ecclesiasticus " which expresses better than any thing I can think of my conception of the way in which Mr. Bright will be regarded by a not distant posterity. "Let us praise famous men," it runs, "and our fathers that begat us. God hath wrought great glory by them through His great power from the beginning; men renowned for their power giving counsel by their understanding, and declaring prophecies; leaders of the people by their counsels and by their knowledge meet for the people, wise and eloquent in their instructions; rich men furnished with ability, living peaceably in their habitations." "All these," it is added, "were honored in their generations, and were the glory of their times." And, assuredly, if characteristics such as these appertain to any man of our day and generation, it is to John Bright. What leader of the people has given wiser counsel, more eloquent instruction—nay, declared more prophecies? As applied to him, the title of Right Honorable is, for a wonder, fully deserved. It fits like a glove. From the beginning of his career until now "great glory has been wrought by him," ​and that, too, "through His great power," Mr. Bright would be the first to postulate.

      Least of all our public men is the illustrious tribune of the people an adventurer, self-seeker, or demagogue. I do not know that he can be described as a "rich" man. "Riches" is a specially comparative term in this aristocracy-ridden land; but certainly the anti-corn law agitation found him a well-to-do man, "furnished with ability, living peaceably in his habitation" at Rochdale, where he might have remained to this day hardly distinguishable from the mass of his fellow-citizens, had he not had what, in the phraseology of Puritanism, is named a "call." He was at the mill, as Elisha was at the plough, when the divine messenger laid hold of him in the guise of a gaunt, starving multitude, for whose wrongs he was imperatively commanded to seek redress at the hands of a heartless and stupid legislature. The corn laws repealed, the horizon of his public duties widened; but the spirit in which he has continued to act has remained the same. He is the great Puritan statesman of England, ever consciously living, as did his favorite poet Milton, "in his great Taskmaster's eye." This is the key to his simple but grand character, as it is to that of the much more complex Gladstone—a singular fact, certainly, in view of the grave doubts now entertained in so many not incompetent quarters with respect to the objective reality of all religious beliefs.

      Mr. Bright has completed his sixty-eighth year, having been born in 1811, in his father's house at Greenbank, near Rochdale. Needless to say his ancestors did not "come over at the Conquest." So far as is known, there is not a single "de" among them. The ​first discoverable local habitation of the Brights is a place still called "Bright's Farm," near Lyneham, in Wiltshire. Here, in 1714, a certain Abraham Bright married Martha Jacobs, a handsome Jewess; and shortly afterwards the couple removed to Coventry, where Abraham begat William Bright, who begat Jacob, who begat Jacob junior, who, coming to Rochdale in 1796, was espoused to