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

erect, and were all attention in a moment. It was curious to observe how the occupants of the Conservative benches, the majority of whom in the late Parliament looked for all the world like a band of horse-jockeys and prize-fighters, were affected. Mr. Bright talked to them with all the simplicity and confidence of a good paterfamilias addressing his family circle with his back to his own mantel-piece. And such talk! No wonder that they listened with silent respect. The whole House was transformed by it, and began to feel something like a proper sense of its own duty and dignity. Before he had spoken five minutes, ​the level of the debate had been raised fifty degrees at least; and there was not an honorable, nor, for the matter of that, a dishonorable, member present who did not feel that the Government was morally and logically routed, whatever its numerical triumph might be. Mr. Bright does one thing of which so many members are oblivious: he never in any of his speeches in Parliament forgets that he is in the great council of the nation; and, however violent may be the supposition, he always assumes that his opponents are there to be convinced, if only the matter at issue is put in a proper light. The prevailing tone of his mind is one of hopefulness. He has large faith, and believes in the inevitable progress of humanity and the ultimate invincibility of truth. As he once said, "There is much shower and sunshine between the sowing of the seed and the reaping of the harvest; but the harvest is reaped after all."

      But, though his nature is large and forgiving, in solemn earnestness of rebuke he is unmatched. Once or twice Lord Palmerston, in the very height of his power and popularity, was made to wince like a convict under the sentence of a judge; and, if we except the unique moral insensibility of a Beaconsfield, it would be difficult to conceive of a more arduous undertaking than that of reaching the conscience of Lord Palmerston. In the terrible struggle which threatened to rend the great American Republic to pieces, the innermost soul of the tribune of the people was stirred within him, and he touched the limits of actual prophecy. In the darkest hour of the fortunes of the North he declared, "The Chancellor of the Exchequer (Mr. Gladstone) as a speaker is not surpassed by any man in England, and ​he is a great statesman. He believes the cause of the North to be hopeless, and that their enterprise cannot succeed. … I have another and a far brighter vision before my gaze. It may be a vision; but I will cherish it. I see one vast confederation stretching from the frozen North in unbroken line to the glowing South, and from the wild billows of the Atlantic westward to the calmer waters of the Pacific main; and I see one people and one language, and one law and one faith, and over all that wide continent the home of freedom and a refuge for the oppressed of every race and of every clime."

      It remains to notice, however briefly, some of the more noticeable events of Mr. Bright's public life. They have not been so numerous as might, on first thoughts, be supposed: for he has all his da3'S been a sower of seed, and not a reaper; and, of much that he has sown, future generations will reap the fruit. His "record" will be best found in his collected speeches, which are, in my opinion, the finest in the language, whether as regards matter or diction. I know no politician who has been more uniformly in the right when others have been in the wrong, and I know no greater master of the English tongue.

      His first public appearance was made at Rochdale, in 1830, in his nineteenth year. It was in favor of temperance, and is said to have been a success. Like most young speakers, he commenced by committing to memory what he intended to utter on the platform, but soon abandoned so clumsy and exhaustive a method of address. Instead of memoriter reproductions, he held impromptu rehearsals at odd hours in his father's mill before Mr. Nicholas Nuttall, an intelligent workman ​and unsparing critic; but even now his perorations are written out with the greatest care. Like most young men in easy circumstances, he had a desire for travel, which was gratified by a visit to Jerusalem. On coming within sight of the Holy City, he was melted to tears.

      In the month of October, 1838, the Anti-Corn Law League had its insignificant and unpromising beginning. Five Scotsmen—W. A. Cunningham, Andrew Dalzell, James Leslie, Archibald Prentis, and Philip Thomson, residents in Manchester—along with William Rawson, a native of the town, met like the apostles of old, in an "upper room," and decreed the origin of the mammoth association. In the printed list of the members of the provisional committee Mr. Bright's name stands second. He had found his vocation; and, in the course of the memorable campaign that followed, he and the late Mr. Cobden contracted a friendship which has justly become historic. In speaking in the House of Mr. Cobden's decease, the strong man, bowed down with the weight of his sorrow, was barely able to utter, "After twenty years of most intimate and almost brotherly friendship with him, I little knew how much I loved him until I found that I had lost him." Siste, viator!

      In 1843 Mr. Bright first took his seat in Parliament for Durham, and in 1847 he was returned for Manchester without opposition. In 1852 he was re-elected after a contest; but at the subsequent general election of 1857 he lost his seat on account of his unbending opposition to the Crimean war, and to the swagger of Palmerston in China. In the autumn of the same year, however, he was returned by Birmingham at a byelection, and has continued to represent the great Radical Mecca in Parliament ever since.

      ​His memorable defeat at Manchester was, for him, the greatest moral victory of his life, and he has had many. With a sublime courage, which has never been surpassed, he strove almost single-handed to arrest in its mad career a whole nation in pursuit of a mischievous phantom. In the American war his services to his own country and to America were unrivalled, and happily more successful.

      That he is one of the best and most intelligent friends of India, of Ireland, and of the unenfranchised and unprivileged masses of Englishmen and Scotsmen will go without saying. As a member of Mr. Gladstone's cabinet he was introduced at court, and is said to be a favorite there. I should have liked him better had he continued—to use his own words—"to abide among his own people." Evil communications have a tendency to corrupt the best manners, and Mr. Bright has never been at his best since he made the acquaintance of royalty.

      Latterly the brunt of the fighting has fallen on Gladstone, who, by an arduous heart-searching process, has, at seventy, reached conceptions of the public good which were familiar to Mr. Bright's mind at twenty. It is Mr. Bright's turn to put his powerful hand to the plough. He looks vigorous as ever, and it has not been his wont to spare himself in great emergencies. Let him remember the wisdom of Ulysses addressed to the "great and godlike" Achilles—

      "To have done,

       Is to hang quite out of fashion, like a rusty mail,

       In monmnental mockery."

      ​

       III. PETER ALFRED TAYLOR.

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      "And I have walked with Hampden and with Vane,

       Names once so gracious in an English ear."

      HAVING now portrayed, however imperfectly, our two most illustrious Radical statesmen—Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Bright, I come to deal with one who is not a statesman—who makes no pretension to statesmanship—but who, as a politician, has nevertheless "been fashioned unto much honor." His name will not be found, I think, even among that multitude which no man can number, the "Men of the Times." Nor is the omission so culpable as may at first sight appear; for Mr. P. A. Taylor belongs at once to the Radical past and the Radical future rather than to the opportunist present. He is the most unique figure in the House of Commons—a man who, in the days of the Long Parliament, would have been after gentle Lucy Hutchinson's own republican heart, and who, in those of Queen Victoria, has been best appreciated by such gifted pioneers of progress as Mazzini and Mill. He has now represented Leicester in Parliament for eighteen years, and all that time he has neither led nor followed—neither been misled by the leaders of his party, nor been found following the multitude to do evil. If he has led at any time, it has been as the ​captain of forlorn hopes, the champion of forgotten rights, the redresser of unheeded wrongs. He is the Incorruptible of the House. In evil and in good report he has striven to subject every issue that has presented itself to the test of general principles of human well-being.

      I am not now considering whether he has