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likeness in the actual men. If Cade had selfish reasons for his agitation, or if he was responsible for any plundering or violence, the two cannot be named together in regard to personal character. But Bright is in the same class with the Gracchi, Rienzi, Cade, Lafayette, and many more in respect of his views and temper about the “barons” of his day. His antagonism to the aristocracy of his country and his time is of the same quality as theirs, and not so much milder as the occasion is. This characteristic of his career is, no doubt, owing in great part to the circumstances of the country when he entered public life. He was first known as a member of the Anti-Corn Law League. He was young and ardent, sure of the soundness of his cause, and abundantly justified, as everybody sees now, in regarding the upholders of the corn laws as the exponents of class selfishness in opposition to the general good. While he had that good cause to fight, he did well on the whole. He was right in his aim, and sound in his arguments; and those who marked the growth of his oratorical power were authorised to expect a great elevation and progress of the liberal cause and its party, through him, in years to come. There was not, as yet, occasion to detect the imperfection of his political knowledge, or the lowness of his political morality, or the dulness of his political sensibility, which have since rendered his political career a hopeless failure.

He has rendered great services, which should be remembered the more carefully the more painfully he has disappointed expectation. His advocacy of free-trade in food was a greater boon than many men have the power of bestowing on their country. He presented a fine example of high courage in his opposition to the last war, however low might be the ground of his arguments. He has certainly roused our conservative fellow citizens, aristocratic or other, to a keener sense of official duty and popular right than they had before; and by intimidation, if by no higher appeal, he has brought them to the point of admitting the necessity of various extensions of liberty in the community. It is no small service to have administered such lively and protracted pleasure to multitudes as his oratory has conveyed, still rising in quality as it has been for a quarter of a century. His awakening influence over the intelligent working-classes of the country might be added, but that the benefit has been neutralised by the mischief wrought by his ignorance, his want of patriotism, and the lowness of moral views from which he never can escape. When he stood forward dauntlessly to denounce the war with Russia, he supposed he had said all in showing “the waste of blood and treasure;” being unaware that there was something in the case more precious to Englishmen than “blood and treasure.” When he advocates that extension of the suffrage to which he has brought any future government to pledge itself, he cannot rise above the consideration of the economy which an improved House of Commons will enforce, and the new distribution of the public burdens which it will effect: and his notions of the requisite changes show his ignorance of political philosophy and history, and his insensibility to the highest features of the polity under which he lives. The same disclosure is made by his long course of laudation of American institutions, the working of which he widely misrepresents, and probably misapprehends, as he misapprehends at home the constitution which he says he has never seen or handled, and cannot find. It is enough to say that, amidst his praise of the American republic, he had never a thought to spare on the depraving operation of slavery, nor a word of censure to throw at it till after the breaking out of the civil war: that he did not foresee the civil war, which the moral sense of any liberal politician must have given warning of; that he condescended to represent to English working-men that American taxation was light, by comparing with ours the taxes levied by the Federal Government only,—omitting the fact that the State imposts are far heavier than the Federal: and that his judgment and feelings about foreign politics are determined, not by the principles of political liberty, but the prospects of British commerce and other convenience. There is worse behind. His denunciations of one order of English society as against another, have grown fiercer in proportion to the restriction of the grounds of such blame. He has incurred the disgrace of “demagoguic ignorance,” and has lost the confidence of the most intelligent part of all classes by the eagerness with which he has wrought at the separation of classes by suspicion, jealousy, and hatred. The hatred he has brought upon himself is a misfortune to the liberal cause in England, as the present so-called “reactionary state of politics” plainly shows. On the other hand, he has had to endure a species of antagonism which no man’s temper can be expected to stand without a warp. When Lord Derby informed the House of Lords that, under no circumstances, would the Queen admit Mr. Bright to the Cabinet, he rendered himself answerable for the consequences of any increased exasperation on the part of the agitator. The effect on Mr. Bright is our concern here, and I need, therefore, say nothing about the unconstitutional spirit of such an avowal, nor of the national sense of insult under it. When Mr. Bright’s class-enmities are censured, it should be carefully considered how much of the mischief is attributable to his normal character of mind, and how much to the statesman who announced, and the authority which enabled him to announce, such a political proscription. Again, the absurd violence with which he has for some time been treated by several of our leading journals has prepared the people who still believe in John Bright (and they are a great multitude) to quarrel on his behalf. He was so much affected by the obloquy he incurred in opposing the war, coming upon the previous exhaustion from over-work, that he retired for a lengthened period, which we all hoped might expand and deepen his mind, and ennoble his future services. The hope was not fulfilled. His second career has been marked by an aggravation of the faults of the first. He has still great power for good or evil over multitudes whom he ought to have led forward in political knowledge, and to whom he could have secured some political privilege by this time, if he had been free from the constant features of the agitator, as distinguished from the statesman. He has not enlightened any class on