BRIGHT, cliquish, and impracticable is the Member for Birmingham. He has set the Press a-ringing with his speeches, and we hope he likes the echoes they have awakened. In this dull season of the year, men of the pen are thankful for any piquant text that may turn up; and the country is so much at a loss as to its wants in the matter of Parliamentary Reform, that it awaits with much curiosity, but no yearning, to see what will be suggested. Like some portly gentleman in very good health, who nevertheless has in evil hour given ear to a bevy of doctors, and has assented to their opinion that "something must be done for him," John Bull awaits very composedly to be told what is the matter with him, but with considerable dubiety as to whether he will swallow the bolus that may be prescribed. Being not amiss as he is, he can afford to be critical; and even at this eleventh hour, when the doctors are preparing their pills, he feels half-inclined to fall back upon his old maxim of letting well alone. The sound of friend Bright's pestleand-mortar has been peculiarly fitted to give him qualms. And through his many voices of the press he has said so very plainly. John Bull has almost no prejudices at present. Never before was he in a mood of such tolerant equanimity. Although friend Bright has been acting most eccentrically of late years-although he has betaken himself to praise everything and everybody save his own country and countrymen, overwhelming these latter with ceaseless invective and abuse,-still John Bull, with his broad tolerance, pricked up his ears and was ready to listen when his pugnacious vituperator stood forth to prescribe for him in the matter of Reform. Very brilliant and telling was the oratory of the Member for Birmingham, and very earnest and self-convinced, on the whole, was the man himself; and John Bull, like everybody else, likes both oratory and earnestness. He likes also pluck,

and does not even mind being abused to his own face, if it be done with spirit and good style. So he did not wonder at the men of Birmingham applauding his and their calumniator. When the gunmakers and sword-welders of that city of sheersteel cried bravo to the pugnacious Quaker, who denounced all our past history and present policy as that of cut-throats and freebooters, and declared that the making of arms and the use thereof was our grand sin and the cause of all our miseries,John Bull quite understood the thing. But he did not quite understand Mr Bright. The more he turned over in his mind the highlyeffective sentences of the sturdy orator, the more puzzled he was to get any two of them that looked like common truth or common sense. He liked the sound of that fiery earnestness, but the signification thereof savoured to him of monomania. Occasionally it had occurred to his candid mind that, despite sundry grievous aberrations, John Bright might one day grow into a statesman fit for the Cabinet; but now he saw, not without a twinge of regret, that it was hopeless to indulge that expectation any more. Severe illness schools men and ripens them. Amidst the gloom and depression of protracted sickness, the eye turns inwards, reviewing old opinions in new lights; the subsoil of one's nature, too, is turned up to day, often producing fruits undreamt of before; and if there be any powers which hitherto have lain latent, the convalescent emerges from that long twilight, if not a sadder, at least a wiser man. There is no sign of any such mellowing or ripening on the part of Mr Bright. On the contrary, it rather seems as if some lingering irritation, so often a sad pendant to severe illness, had intensified his former crotchets and pugnacious discontent with all things. In his speeches at Birmingham, he not only lost sight of all that was practicable, and prescribed theories which were impossible of adoption, but he also

exhibited himself in that most useless of all characters-namely, that of one who (to use Fielding's phrase) sets himself to "damn the nature of things," and inveighs against the world as wholly out of joint, simply because it does not square with his own narrow fancies. He does not desire reform, but revolution — an object which, we are happy to say, is at present as impracticable as at all times it is undesirable.

Mr Bright is the orator of a sect, not of a nation. Narrow and fervid, he is admirably fitted to champion any isolated cause in which his sympathies may be enlisted; but he has not the breadth and calmness of judgment to view it in all its relations, or even to perceive whether his premises be true or his ends practicable. A child will cry and refuse to be comforted, because he cannot get the pretty moon which shines above him; and for an object quite as senseless and impracticable, John Bright will expend his finest oratory without being in the least degree conscious of the absurdity. His native temperament is doubtless chiefly to blame for this. The blood is ever mounting from his heart to his eyes, and disturbing his mental vision. But his training or surroundings in life, as often happens, have been in unison with his idiosyncrasy. Of all sects in this country, the Quakers are the most crotchety, and have least in common with the general population. The shape of a hat, the cut of a coat, the colour of inexpressibles, are to them points of weighty moment, and dignities and varieties of rank of all kinds are an abomination to them. From their youth upwards they are trained to attach a frivolous and morbid importance to trifles and impracticable theories; and hence they are more prone than other men to commit the mistake of elevating mere crotchets to the rank of what Carlyle calls the "eternal verities." In fact their whole creed as regards War is a figment of the closet; very well for a small sect to hold as a theory, but quite out of place in the world as it is. An empire of Quakers would not be long an empire; and they maintain their tenets as individuals simply be

cause, being mere motes in the population, other people act and fight for them, so that they are not left at the mercy of their own principles. Such is the narrow crotchety sect amidst whom Mr Bright grew up to manhood; and when he at length stepped beyond the limits of Quakerdom (though without leaving it), he joined himself to that political clique with whom he had most in common; namely, those who, like the Quakers, fancy the general world in which they live quite corrupt and out of joint, and who are for pulling down all dignities and varieties of rank to the impossible level of a monotonous democracy. It is not in such soil, and amidst such environments, that the broad wisdom of statesmanship grows. It must be added, too, that, content with his power of telling advocacy, Mr Bright has never engaged in the studies most indispensable to a statesman. Captivated by the crude theories and vague generalities of his clique, he has never traced in history the working of similar notions in other times and countries. He does not understand the passions to which he appeals; he does not know the elements with which he desires to work. The different character and the different circumstances of nations are things for which he has no regard, because no real perception of them. Democracy here, democracy in France, democracy in Athens, democracy in America, are in his eyes all the same thing. He cannot discriminate. In fact, we should say that his vision is so disturbed by his own fancies that he cannot perceive at all; for of what use is sight to one who imagines the masses of mankind to be Quakerish, pacific, and self-restrained? If Mr Bright have ever read history, it must have been in some work of his own, still unpublished, and during the composition of which he has been looking at the projected eidola of his own mind, rather than at the ongoings of the real world of living men.

His speeches at Birmingham are brimful of such historical and statistical mirages. We have neither the patience nor the ambition to follow him through all his blunderings. To do so, we should have to write a His

tory and Defence of the British Nation. Nothing pleases Mr Bright. He can see nothing good anywhere within the four seas. From Land's End to John O'Groat's, all in his eyes is barren, all is unprofitable and unutterably wicked. In his first speech he attacked the present political condition of the country, denouncing it as wrong-altogether wrong from top to bottom. In his second speech he dealt with our history in an equally summary fashion, representing that in every leading point the past career of the British State has been highly criminal and deplorably corrupt,but without explaining how it has notwithstanding prospered so amazingly. In the eyes of Mr Bright, the Revolution of 1688 is the source of all our evils; the Reform Bill of 1832 is a wicked sham; the Church of England is a monstrous offspring of adultery; the House of Lords is a mar-all and an abomination; the British Government is one which delights to engage in most wicked wars; and the British people is altogether the most forlorn and miserable in the world! In fact, our country appears to him such an unspeakably hopeless and ill-conditioned place, that, when applied to by the working-classes of Glasgow, his only advice to them was, Get out of it!" Such is Mr Bright's creed, as expounded in his two orations at Birmingham. He is a man peculiarly one-eyed and insensible to evidence; but as his damnatory crotchets have never before taken so wide a sweep, or expanded into such wholesale burlesque, one is tempted to ask what specialty of circumstances or condition could have tempted him to such a display. An osseous particle in the dura mater is known to make men as morose and insensible to reason as a mad bull is; and even in his calmest days, the sight of a Peer, or Bishop, or a General in uniform, used to act on the Quaker-temperament of Mr Bright very much as the sight of scarlet irritates the horned leader of the herd. But in truth the damnatory faculty of Mr Bright was roused to the uttermost by the peculiarity of the occasion. Here was he, a Quaker, a quondam supporter of the Czar Nicholas, the friend and advocate of

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every one who chose to attack our troops or insult our ambassadors. Here was this champion of "peace at any price," and this constant denunciator of our Government as at all times in the wrong, face to face with the men of Birmingham, who hated the Czar as they hated the devil, and whose enthusiastic reception of Kossuth and his lectures shows how readily they would plunge into war simply for the sake of helping the "nationalities." Mr Bright, like the rest of his kind, loves popularity. And now, when he had been generously recalled from that retirement which was as distasteful to him as the sick-room, he had every desire to stand well with his sturdy constituents, who (he must know) elected him not on account of his peace-principles, but in spite of them. Small wonder, then, that he should attempt to find an extenuation of his past conduct by representing the wars of Great Britain as the grand source of misery to her people. Very adroitly did he proceed in his work. He had two objects in view. He sought very quietly and unobtrusively to justify himself, and he wanted also to get up an agitation for revolutionary Reform. And he made these two objects to play into one another with exquisite tact and skill. In his first speech, with fervid oratory, he called upon his audience to look with his eyes, and behold corruption everywhere in our Government and upper classes, and misery and pauperism everywhere among "the people." In the great institutions of the empire, he called upon them to see nothing but shams or iniquities. And the existence of these iniquitous institutions, and of the misery which he painted in the people, he ascribed all to the influence of the aristocracy, for whose interests (he said) the rest of the community are kept in penury and thraldom! In speech No. 2, in subtle sequel, he set himself to explain how it came to pass that so miserable a state of things prevailed amongst us,attributing it all to the wars in which the country has engaged, and these wars in turn to the selfishness of the aristocracy! Thus did he seek to execute his two grand objects of whitewashing himself, and of rousing a

revolutionary agitation, by blackening the aristocracy and decrying the whole institutions and conditions of the empire! Very natural objects these to a democratic Quaker; but requiring too monstrous a distortion of facts to pass unquestioned, we should think, even by the gunmakers of Birmingham.

There is very little desire in the country for Parliamentary Reform. Were each voter questioned separately, we believe a great majority would express aversion or disinclination to change at present, and very few indeed would exhibit the least enthusiasm on its behalf. Punch's sketch of John Bright blowing the bellows in the hope of kindling a heat for Reform, portrays the simple truth. No practical grievance is felt to arise from the present regime, -unless it be that the House of Commons is too full of inane mediocrities, who know nothing of statesmanship and imperial interests, but who pledge themselves to look well after the interests of their own town or city: a defect not likely to be mended by any further lowering of the franchise. Reform in its present aspect is a mere theory. It is not that the present Act does not work well enough: what is wanted is one which will look better. No wonder, then, that amongst a practical nation like ours, there should be little enthusiasm on the subject, and that Mr Bright should have to puff with his bellows so strongly and unscrupulously. He does not stick at trifles. What are blunders and misrepresentations to him, if they help him to get up his panorama of grievances? He is a fiery apostle of Discontent, and won't lose a drop from any scruple about the veracities. In fact, there are to him no veraci ties but his own sweeping tableaux. What are your historians, statesmen, and statistics to him? What are Hume, Smollett, Mahon, Alison, and Macaulay-what are Cromwell and William III., Walpole, Pitt, Fox, and Peel,-what are M'Culloch, Porter, blue-books, and census reports, to John Bright, when they give the lie to his artistic tableaux and astounding hypotheses? What cares he for them the unread by him, or little

known-when the very world of fact which lies around him he misinterprets or contemns. He cannot allude to the most patent facts or best-known events without colouring them most_audaciously, to suit his purpose. He cannot speak of our paupers and poor-rates without adding three millions to the numbers of the one, and one million sterling to the amount of the other. By a single flourish of his rhetoric he annihilates a million inhabitants of the "emerald isle," and represents the decrease of the Irish population between 1845 and 1851 as amounting to three millions, whereas it was just about one million and three-quarters,

the population in 1845 being about 8,300,000, and in 1851, 6,500,000. Again, to corroborate his assertion as to the inequality of taxation upon land and upon personal property, he gave a version of a particular case which must be both incomplete and inaccurate; moreover ignoring the fact that nine-tenths of the large estates of the kingdom are entailed, and confer only a life-interest, whereas personal property is unentailed, and becomes the absolute property of him who succeeds to it. Entailed estates, too, change hands and pay the succession-duty at least as often as personal property; and they cannot evade taxation by a transfer during life, as personal property often does. And over and above all this, what is to be thought of Mr Bright's honesty, when, in quoting a case to make people believe that the owners of land do not bear their fair share of the public burdens, he entirely ignores the many burdens which fall upon the landowners almost exclusively, such as tithes, church-rates, road-rates, the specific land - tax, and also that portion of the assessed taxes which necessarily presses more heavily on the landowners than on any other class. Again, see the democratic Quaker's profound ignerance and unfairness when he speaks of the Church. "In England." he said, "only one-third of the people have any connection whatever with the Established Church," a statement so utterly false that he might well add, that "probably many persons at that meeting were not aware

of this fact." It is a fact which has no existence save as an 66 idol" (as Bacon calls such phantasms) in the heated brain of Mr Bright. Even the statistics of Mr Horace Mann, appealed to by Mr Bright-which were publicly impugned at the time, and the unreliable character of which was virtually admitted by the very Government under whose auspices they were issued-show that the ground occupied by the Church of England, as compared with all denominations of dissent, is not onethird, but one-half, so that he cannot even quote an authority, however worthless that authority may be, without perpetrating a most gross and wilful exaggeration. But other data of a more reliable character than Mr Mann's are fortunately within reach of everybody, by which the falseness of Mr Bright's statement is evidenced at once. In the matter of education, we find that, of the schools built or enlarged by Privy Council grants during the last nineteen years, 91 per cent belong to the Church of England; of the scholars provided with accommodation, 87 per cent are Church scholars; and of the sums contributed to the erection of these schools thus assisted by the Privy Council, 90 per cent is contributed for Church schools. Thus, whether as regards the lower classes, for whose benefit these schools are provided, or the upper and middle classes, by whose subscription the schools are erected, the Church is ahead of all the other religious bodies put together, in a proportion varying from 87 to 91 per cent. Or if we look at the entire number of schools for the labouring classes in England and Wales, it appears from a report recently presented to Parliament by Mr Mann himself, that 81 per cent of the schools and 76 per cent of the scholars belong to the Church, upwards of a million sterling being contributed by Churchmen for their support! Finally, to take a yet different test, we find from the official return of marriages in England and Wales, that in this the most important event of their lives, not less than 84 per cent of the population have recourse to the Established Church. And yet this consummate charlatan,

VOL. LXXXIV.-NO. DXVIII.

who boasts that "his political career is on a line with his conscientious convictions," and who denounces all but himself and clique as fools and knaves, has the audacity to promulgate as truth that "in England only one-third of the people have any connection whatever with the Estabblished Church!

When Mr Bright cannot or will not see the truth at home, in the little world of our own islands, it is not to be expected that he should know better, or speak more guardedly and conscientiously, of things abroad. The United States of America are the idol which his Quaker heart worships and his tongue bepraises. And yet, at every turn of his fiery oratory, he shows that he knows nothing whatever of the real condition of the American republic. In truth, it is this very ignorance which is the source of his inspiration. If he knew better, he would rhapsodise less. The United States of his dreams is a very different country from what he would find were he to cross the Atlantic. It is his "Arcadia"-his " Happy Valley;" and he will be as slow to abandon his dream as Johnson was when Bruce declared that Abyssinia was not the least like the land of Rasselas. The great Doctor went to his grave believing Bruce a consummate liar; and probably John Bright to his dying day will think the same of those who attempt to put him right as to the "model republic" of the West. It is this mere fiction of a fervent ignorance that he proposes as the model after which Great Britain should be revolutionised! Even if his dream were true, and if the American republic were all that he paints it, common-sense might tell him that what does well in America will not of necessity do well here. The difference in the natural circumstances of the two countries is immense, so that it is impossible to have the same social or political condition in each. Waste lands of inexhaustible extent and great natural fertility-virgin soils of the best quality-are ever open to the population of the Union, draining away the surplus hands from the old seats of industry: acting socially

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