The late misunderstanding between this country and Great Britain,
relative to Mason and Slidell, elicited a free expression of opinion
from the statesmen of the mother country, as to the contest now
proceeding in this country; and while we regretted to witness so many
proofs of the prejudice and jealousy which seem to hold possession of
the minds of our transatlantic cousins, we were gratified by the heroic
and brilliant defense of our cause by one so eminent in intellectual and
moral qualities as JOHN BRIGHT. The boldness and vigor of his efforts to
dispel the hostility of his compatriots toward America, and the masterly
ability with which he disarmed the weapons of our opponents, elicited
the respect of our people and have made his name one of veneration among
them. His position in our favor, amid the many discouragements which
beset him, justifies an attempt to lay before our readers an account of
his career and character, which, we doubt not, they will be interested
to hear.
John Bright, Member of Parliament for the great city of Birmingham, is
the son of respectable Quaker parents, and was born at Greenbank, near
Rochdale, in the year 1811. His family being largely interested in the
cotton manufacture, he was bred to a participation in this employment,
and is now the senior member of an extensive and enterprising firm, in
company with his brothers. It is hardly to be expected that one whose
early youth had been devoted to the restricted sphere of a
counting-room, would be remarkable for an extensive knowledge of men and
events, liberal opinions, freshness of intellect, and vigorous
brilliancy of declamation; and yet Mr. Bright has always manifested
superiority in these qualities. Known, while occupied exclusively in the
details of his proper avocation, for skill, promptness, and enterprise,
he has also been distinguished, since his sphere of usefulness has been
extended to the national councils, for the scope and accuracy of his
general information, the comprehensiveness of his mind, the richness of
his imagination, and the effective energy of his eloquence. He early
manifested an interest in politics, which was intensified by the
agitation of questions nearly affecting his own business interests. The
celebrated Anti-Corn-Law League, which was instituted in the time of
Lord Melbourne's ministry, by some eminent Whigs, for the purpose of
opposing the tariff erected by the corn-laws, excited his enthusiastic
coöperation, and afforded him an early opportunity of entering political
life. The enlightened ideas of the Reformers had already effected a
glorious renovation in the machinery of the government; and the
regeneration of the commercial system was next to be accomplished, by a
successful resistance to the selfish restrictions imposed upon trade by
the landed proprietors. In such a cause, John Bright embarked in his
twenty-seventh year; and his subsequent career has been a consistent
adherence to the same views which marked his entrance into public
notice. He espoused with ardor the principles avowed by the League, and
leaving the management of his private interests in the hands of the
junior members of the firm, began to discuss them publicly, with great
force and effect. The League soon perceived the valuable acquisition
they had made in the young Quaker, and not only encouraged him to
exertion but gave him opportunities to appear before many important
assemblages. On the list of orators whom the League commissioned to go
into the agricultural districts to advocate their cause, Mr. Bright's
name soon became prominent. By the irresistible cogency and energetic
expression which characterized his speech before many thousands in Drury
Lane Theatre, his reputation became national, and printed copies being
distributed throughout England, a desire to hear him on the important
question of the day became every where manifest. He went about among the
farmers and gentry, instilling with ability the principles of free
trade, developing arguments with telling effect, and rapidly organizing
branches of the League throughout the kingdom. The distrust of the lower
classes, which was awakened in some degree against the nobles and nabobs
who sustained the League, did not operate against him, who, as a man
directly from the people, educated in the stern school of labor, and as
the daily witness of and sympathizer with the suffering of the poor, at
once elicited their confidence in his honesty and their respect for his
intellectual power. Political advantage, which might be sought by
life-long politicians and hereditary nobles, could, they well knew,
offer no inducement to nor corrupt the ingenuous principles of one who
showed so little respect to party distinction, and who was entirely
independent of great connections.
The statesmen with whom he acted, in favor of free trade, were unwilling
to be without so valuable an ally on the floor of the House of Commons;
and, in April, 1843, he was placed in nomination by his numerous friends
at Durham, for the seat to which that city was entitled.
On the first trial, he was defeated; but a new election for the same
city becoming necessary in the following July, he was returned, by a
gratifying majority, to represent a place noted for its conservative
proclivities. He continued the member for Durham until 1847.
His first efforts, after entering Parliament, were directed to the
repeal of the Corn-Laws, in which beneficent measure he coöperated with
such men as Charles P. Villiers, brother of Lord Clarendon, Lord
Morpeth, now Earl of Carlisle, Lord John Russell, and his friend, Mr.
Richard Cobden. Sir Robert Peel, who was at that time Prime Minister,
had always adhered to the protective doctrines of Pitt and Wellington;
and it was mainly due to the clear and cogent reasoning of Bright and
his associates, that the illustrious statesman at the head of the
Treasury finally yielded, with a magnanimity never surpassed in the
annals of ministerial history, to the enlightened policy of free trade
in respect to corn. The distress which had for years resulted from the
stringent enactments of Lord Liverpool's government to the lower class,
was, by this patriotic sacrifice of the first minister, done away with;
and not least among those who contributed to the accomplishment of so
auspicious a result, we must reckon the subject of this sketch. The Tory
party, headed by such chiefs as Wellington and Lyndhurst, in the Lords,
and Stanley and Disraeli, in the Commons, made a stern and pertinacious
resistance to the repeal; and no one was more feared by the intellectual
giants of that party than was Bright. His severe wit, his plain, blunt
manner of exposing the defects of his opponents, and his impulsive and
overwhelming declamation, were hardly exceeded by the fluent exuberance
of Stanley and the keen sarcasm of the Hebrew novelist, Disraeli.
While he generally acted with the party of which Lord Russell and Lord
Landsdowne were the chiefs, he did not place himself supinely under the
dictation of the caucus-room. Professing to be bound by the precepts of
no faction, acting frequently with the conservatives, although oftener
with the liberals, independent of ministerial control, and disdaining to
attain power by the sacrifice of any principle, he was excluded from a
participation in the government, when those with whom he in general
sympathized succeeded to the administration in 1846. He early adopted
ultra-liberal views, and has always been known as the advocate of
universal suffrage, the separation of Church and State, and the
diminution of the influence of hereditary nobles; and although he could
not but be aware that many of his doctrines were repugnant to those of
his auditors, and a majority of his countrymen, he has not hesitated to
uphold and express them with great perseverance and ingenuousness.
Had he lived in the days of Russell and Sidney, he had perhaps shared
their fate, and paid the penalty of unpopular politics on the scaffold.
That bold spirit which he has ever manifested, exciting his great
talents in the advocacy of repugnant theories, would not have feared the
restraints which a ruder age encouraged despotic kings to put upon
freedom of political action. Luckily, he has been living in an age which
respects independent thought and proscribes the conscience of no man.
While he is certainly premature in his theories of equality, the
tendency of popular feeling is toward him rather than from him. Tory
policy to-day was Whig policy a century ago. Walpole would have
sustained the younger Pitt, and Derby and Lyndhurst will hardly dispute
the benefits of the reform of 1832.
Mr. Bright was returned to Parliament for Manchester, in 1847, and again
in 1852. This great town, which is the market for Rochdale, and
consequently in which he was well known, sent him to the Commons by a
handsome majority of eleven hundred. In the early session of 1857, Mr.
Cobden introduced a motion condemning the war into which the
administration had entered with China, on which the government was
defeated. Mr. Bright, though absent on account of ill-health, used his
influence in favor of the motion, by reason of which, on the appeal of
Lord Palmerston to the country, during the summer of that year, he was
defeated in his constituency by over five thousand votes; his successful
opponent, though agreeing with him in general, being a supporter of the
Chinese war.
In 1859, he was reinstated in Parliament, by the electors of Birmingham,
of whose manufacturing interests he had always shown himself a
consistent and ardent friend. For this constituency he is now member. He
has been twice married; first, to the daughter of Jonathan Priestley,
Esq., of Newcastle-on-Tyne, who died in 1841; and secondly, to his
present wife, the eldest daughter of W. Leatham, Esq., of Wakefield,
York.
His career of nineteen years in the House of Commons has been a series
of successful efforts, not only contributing to his lasting fame as an
orator and legislator, but achieving many important modifications in the
commercial system and in public sentiment. He has been the life of the
radical party, leading them on in their crusades against existing abuses
with fearless audacity, encouraging them to renewed contests, animating
them by the hopefulness and enthusiasm of his own soul, and by his lucid
logic attracting new converts to his views with every year. The Radicals
who, when he entered Parliament, were a mere handful, are already
assuming, under the vigorous lead of Bright, Cobden, and Villiers, the
proportions of a systematic and powerful element in the lower house.
Caring little for the impotent sneers of an aristocracy in its dotage,
and mindful only to advance systems of popular improvement and
alleviation, he has become a nucleus around which has gathered the
extreme wing of the liberal party. The last century beheld the
profligate Wilkes and the shallow Burdett at the head of the ultraists;
our own time is more fortunate in superseding vicious and unprincipled
radical leaders by men more virtuous and ingenuous. The great
manufacturing towns and districts, composed mainly of the lower orders
of society, and devoted to the interests of commerce, as opposed to the
narrow demands of the agricultural interest, have, owing in a great
degree to Mr. Bright's exertions, become pillars of his party. Lord
Palmerston, than whom a more sagacious politician does not or has not
existed, testified his knowledge of the influence of the Bright party,
by offering Mr. Cobden a seat in the Cabinet, and afterward by sending
him as special agent of England to negotiate a commercial treaty with
France.
John Bright has always shown himself a staunch friend to the prosperity
of the United States. Whenever an opportunity offered in which to
propose this country as an example worthy of the imitation of his own
countrymen, he has never failed to urge the superiority of our system.
His political ideas, approaching to republicanism, and abhorring the
dominance of hereditary aristocrats, and a political Church, have found
their theories realized in the admirable machinery of our own
government. Untainted with that jealous prejudice which appears to
animate many of his fellow-citizens, he can discern, and is ready to
acknowledge, the superior efficacy of the principles which underlie our
Constitution. No one has, of late, been more earnest in denunciation of
the irritating policy of Great Britain toward America, than Mr. Bright.
His personal appearance is that of a hearty, good-natured, and yet
determined Englishman, and both his form and face betoken the John Bull
as much as any member of the House. His morals are of a high order, his
honesty proverbial, his courage undoubted, his social character amiable,
and calculated to make him welcome to every circle. It is said, that
although opposed in the extreme to the political doctrines of Lord
Derby, his personal relations with that aristocratic nobleman are not
only friendly, but intimate; and that, after abusing one another lustily
at Westminster, they retire together arm in arm, chatting and laughing
as familiarly as if there never had been the least difference of opinion
between them. Like Fox, in this particular, he never allows his partisan
views to interfere with his social relations; and although he is a
fierce and bitter antagonist on the benches of Parliament, no one is a
more constant or a more zealous friend in private life. His efforts have
always been enlisted in behalf of the education of the masses;
conceiving that this is the foundation of a thoroughly popular political
system, such as he is desirous to introduce into the British
Constitution. Bred among a timid and peaceful sect, his opposition to
wars has been determined and earnest; and he was one of those who, in
1854, sent a deputation to the Emperor Nicholas to urge an abandonment
of his war policy, and the maintenance of peace, as the duty of a
Christian race. He is, however, rather fitted to be a reformer and
agitator than a statesman. He has all that enthusiasm, all that energy,
all that courage, all that stubborn perseverance in the pursuit of his
purpose, which distinguish the characters of those men who have
conducted the great revolutions of society to a successful issue.
Perhaps he would be found deficient in judging how far to proceed in
innovation; but this, though an important, is not an essential element
in the composition of the mere reformer. It is for him to lead on the
people to great and startling changes, to overturn tyrannies, to break
down old forms, to inculcate novel precepts, to regenerate public
sentiment. These rather require an impetuous spirit, a bold heart, an
active and restless mind, than calmness, judgment, and deliberation. It
is when a new polity is to be erected, when revolution has passed away,
and the crisis reached and left, when a constitution is to be framed,
and new principles are to be brought to their test, that the steady
process of a sound judgment is called into requisition. Then it is that
the reformer yields to the statesman; that impulse retires before
reason; that passion and confusion become subordinated to the elements
of order and the authority of intellect. Many have been both the
reformers producing and the statesmen correcting, revolutions; minds
which, with the fire of enthusiasm, and the hot impulse of indignation
at wrongs done, have united a judicious discrimination, a cool faculty
of reflection, and the power of separating the benefits from the evils
of revolution.
It is certain that Mr. Bright would be a fearless and zealous reformer;
it is doubtful whether he would not give place to others in the
after-work. Well qualified to lead an enthusiastic faction to a crusade
against precedent and authority, he has thus far failed to show himself
capable of conducting an administration. Among the statesmen of modern
times, honesty and enthusiasm are not qualities which control the policy
of the state. Compare the crafty demeanor, the dubious expressions, the
cautious statements of Earl Russell, with the plain, rude, blunt
harangues of Mr. Bright, and we perceive the qualities which have
elevated the former, and those which have kept the latter in the
background. Lord Russell thinks what is for his interest to think; Mr.
Bright thinks what that homely monitor, his conscience, urges on him.
Lord Russell might adopt all the consequences of universal suffrage, and
the principles of free trade, if he could still sit at the
council-board, and dictate dispatches with a double meaning to foreign
governments; but he fears to go beyond, though he nearly approaches, the
line which separates the popular from the unpopular reformer.
Expediency, on the contrary, forms no part of Mr. Bright's creed; and,
not being a scion of a noble and illustrious house, nor having attained
a position in the state which might have made him a conservative, he has
no hesitation in announcing his opinions in favor of universal suffrage
and free trade, in opposition of a dominant aristocracy, and in defiance
of a religious establishment, and dares with provoking coolness the
retaliation of the great and powerful of the land.
Mr. Bright's oratory is of a fresh, vigorous, and versatile character,
and never fails to draw a multitude to the House when it is announced
that he is to speak. Unlike the hesitating and timid delivery of
Russell, the rapid jargon of Palmerston, the rich and graceful
intonation of Gladstone, or the splendid sarcasm of Disraeli, his
eloquence is bold, masculine, and ringing, and gives a better idea of
intellectual and physical strength than any other speaker in the House.
Although blunt, and careless of the feelings of others, there is a
certain elegance in every sentence, which softens the rude sentiment
into a vigorous anathema. Accurate in fact, naturally easy in delivery,
bitter in irony, and ingenuous in argument, few are ready to meet him on
the floor of the Commons. He is a fair specimen of what we hear called
'the fine old English gentleman,' without the ignorance, the bigotry,
the awkwardness, and the peevishness, which go to make up the characters
of a large proportion of the country baronets and gentry; that is, he is
hearty, cordial, and merry, entering with enthusiasm into whatever he
proposes to do, and determined to leave no stone unturned to accomplish
it. If he should live to see the day when his countrymen shall adopt the
views of which he is the foremost champion, no honor of the state will
be denied him, and his name will rank with those of William of Orange,
and Lord Grey, as the regenerators of the British Constitution; and if
he does not, he can not but be respected, as Milton and Sidney are, by
future generations, for his honesty, his patriotism under difficulty,
and his fearless spirit.
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