grounds that I solicit your suffrages;-it is for this alone, the assertion of my principles, and the maintenance of my opinions, that I am prepared to sacrifice the comforts of my present mode of life-to give up a home which is dear to me to leave a family which is dear to me-and to part with comforts which cannot be enjoyed by any man who takes a prominent part in public affairs. It is for the maintenance of those principles that I am here in your city. I will buy no votes. I don't wish them, unless they are given freely. I am persuaded that the majority of those who hear me rejoice that corruption is at an end in the city of Durham. It would be an insult to nineteen out of every twenty of the men in this assemblage if I were to say or to think otherwise. I know perfectly well that you have honest wishes, and would like to be independent. I am sure that a vast proportion of you are in favour of honesty and independence in the exercise of the elective franchise. There have been men to whom I have been pointed out as their enemy, because I am here in consequence of the overthrow of a system which faction had created. But I do not come here to ask for the vote of any man who I believe for a moment could think that a paltry, absurd, ridiculous, bad custom should be put into the balance against the rights, and the interests, and the prosperity of this great community. On these grounds, then, I come before you. I intend to canvass, if possible, every elector; and I trust that when the poll is declared from yonder window, or wherever the Mayor may determine, the opinions of the electors of Durham will be declared to be in favour of justice, and mercy, and truth, as applied to legislation in this country; instead of that cruel, and unjust, and merciless system of monopoly and extravagance under which we have so long laboured.'

There is no speech by Mr. Bright in his early electioneering campaigns which more clearly, if indeed so clearly, sets forth his relations to the great working-class constituency as this particular Durham speech. In that address he distinctly promulgates the grounds upon which he had at all a right to challenge public sympathy. While justly warm, perhaps, as one of his temperament must necessarily be, over the peculiar forms of oppression current, he was never that offensive partisan which has too frequently been represented. It may be maintained by some that the model politician is he who considers the claims of both parties from a far distance; but in periods of crisis it is not the careful weighing of political axioms, but action, that is requisite. The country had arrived at such a crisis when Mr. Bright was contesting Durham in 1843, and it

behoved him to speak out, and to speak boldly and uncompromisingly. This he unquestionably did; and there is no political address by the right hon. gentleman which demands more careful perusal than the one from which we have quoted. It had less of appeal to feelings than to principles; and yet the closing passage above extracted, while convincing from the argumentative point of view, is still more conclusive and admirable from that nobly-apologetic side which has since been illustrated by such distinguished examples as those of Cardinal Newman and Mr. Gladstone.

For two days Mr. Bright was now actively engaged in canvassing, but on the evening of the second day he delivered another stirring address to the electors. 'I am one,' he said, 'who has been taught to believe-and the longer I live, the more convinced I am that that belief has a just foundationthat there is no bad law which can be passed by Government whose influence is not felt even in the smallest cottage in the most remote part of the country. It is said sometimes-or some poet has said-I forget the exact quotation, but the meaning of it is—

"How small a part of ills which men endure

Are those which kings or laws can make or cure."

Now I believe there are laws in this country, some of which have wrought much evil; and that by a removal of those evil laws, and the substitution of good ones, great evil might be done away with, and great good produced. The speaker then referred to the suffering in Durham, and the lack of employment, remarking that the interests of the electors had heretofore been sacrificed at the shrine of party. Now he (Mr. Bright) came before them entirely unconnected with either or with any party in the State. He would support no ministry as a ministry. They could have no interest in Sir Robert Peel remaining in power, unless he did something to bring about a better state of things in the country, and ensure just and impartial government. He was no enemy of Sir Robert Peel; he only spoke of him in his capacity of Prime Minister. With regard to the coal duty, the candidate observed that it was nothing but direct plunder of certain property in Northumberland and Durham; and it was put on for the purpose of staving off for a time the abolition of the Corn Laws, and of the sugar and coffee monopolies. 'I think when men are obliged to immure themselves deep in mines, until they almost forget that a sun was made, that they of all men have a right to demand of

any government that no tax should be placed upon what they bring up from the mine, in order that the demand for that commodity may not be diminished-that their wages may not fall-and that their families may not derive less of the comforts they are entitled to from those hard and dangerous labours in which they are engaged.'

From this passage of his speech, which was warmly appreciated, Mr. Bright went on to reply to certain objections which had been raised against Free Trade. One of his points was received with loud laughter and cheering. 'I have heard of a waiter,' he remarked, who was so exceedingly clever, that it was said he could pack a quart of wine into a pint bottle; but I never heard of any one who was clever enough to get a quart of wine out of a pint bottle. And don't you know that in the case of a deficient harvest, the landowner, being the strongest, will get his share as long as he can; that the farmer, being the next strongest, will get his share of what the farm produces as long as he can; that the labourer, being the weakest, must come in for the greatest share of the scarcity which is caused by the deficient harvest?' Mr. Bright then quoted passages from a speech made by a Mr. Munday, a large farmer near Andover, to prove that it was worse than a folly, it was a crime, to assert that the labourers on a farm were benefited in any way by high prices and scarcity. Every man who refused to vote for the abolition of such a system as this, which by law made famine-which doomed hundreds and thousands of honest men and their families to the utmost destitution which could possibly be imagined-was not a freeman; nor did he wish to make others free. The speaker next dwelt upon the necessity for the ballot, for he had himself discovered that a wide system of intimidation prevailed. Two candidates had recently stood for Nottingham on the principle of purity of election-Joseph Sturge and Mr. Gisborne-and the latter had now been returned. Why could not the men of Durham act in the same way? Towards the conclusion of his address, Mr. Bright made the following appeal, which greatly moved the attentive crowd of listeners:

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'I have found, as I said before, suffering among you, and believe it arises from bad laws; and I believe that that suffering may be removed. I have seen your houses a great number of little children; and some of them reminded me of one I have at home; and I am sure that my child is no dearer to me than your children are to you. I have seen some that looked as if born in poverty. I saw one cradle to-day, with a little child in it, that almost brought the tears to my eyes to see the little clothing it had about it. It was well it was summer, or it must have suffered greatly from the cold. Well, now, if

a man have three or four children, he has just three or four times as much interest in having the Corn Laws abolished as the man who has none. Your children will grow up to be men and women. It may be that your heads will be laid in the grave before they come to manhood or womanhood; but they will grow up, and want employment at honest trades-want houses and furniture, food and clothing, and all the necessaries and comforts of life. They will be honest and industrious as yourselves. But the difficulties which surround you will be increased tenfold by the time they have arrived at your age. Trade will then have become still more crippled; the supply of food still more diminished; the taxation of the country still further increased. The great lords, and some other people, will have become still more powerful, unless the freemen and electors of Durham and of other places stand to their guns, and resolve that, whatever may come of Queen, or Lords, or Commons, or Church, or anybody,-great and powerful, and noble though they be,-the working classes will stand by the working classes; and having the honesty to live by the work of their own hands, will stand up for the rights of honest industry; and will no longer lay themselves down in the dust to be trampled upon by the iron heel of monopoly, and have their very lives squeezed out of them by evils such as I have described.'

At a later meeting, Mr. Bright stated that a deputation from the ironworkers of Staffordshire (who were in no better position than the coalworkers) had had an interview with Sir Robert Peel, to lay before him the distressed condition of the trade, and the appalling state of destitution into which the people were being plunged. Sir Robert said he could do nothing for them; he would take the subject into consideration; he sympathized marvellously with them; but he had no remedy for their distresses. All this misery arose from causes which he (Mr. Bright) had often pointed out. The evil was due to bad. government. You have in this country all that should make you the most prosperous and contented people under heaven. Providence has blessed you abundantly. Your prayers for daily bread-your prayers for every blessing upon your country-have been answered long ago from heaven. But there is another power which arrests the bounty of heaven, and dooms the children of our common Father, by hundreds of thousands, to intolerable suffering, when he has designed for them every great and continued happiness and enjoyment.'

The nomination took place on the 24th of July. Mr. Bright and his supporters first appeared at the hustings; and the cheers with which they were greeted lasted for some minutes. His opponent, Mr. Purvis, whose chief distinction seems to have been that he brought amusement into the contest, exhibited singular nervousness in mounting the steps to the hustings, and his reception when there was such as would have discouraged a much bolder man. The Tory candidate, however, to his credit be it said, went through his uncomfortable experiences very good-humoredly. Mr. Bright himself was in excellent form all

through the proceedings-enjoying the fun which was then inseparable from a nomination day at an English election, and even contributing to it himself.

Mr. John Henderson proposed, and Mr. William Shields seconded, the nomination of Mr. Bright; and Mr. J. W. Hays proposed, and Mr. John Foster seconded, that of Mr. Thomas Purvis, who for some inscrutable reason appears to have been always called 'Billy'-a name which invariably evoked roars of laughter. Mr. Bright first addressed the assembly, and began by calling upon the electors to decide whether they would support the rights and interests of the people in general, or give their power and influence to a class which had already far too much power and influence in the country. He then proceeded to overhaul the opinions of his opponent, respecting which great difficulty of accurate knowledge existed. When asked, during the delivery of his addresses, what those opinions were, he referred the electors to his handbills; and on turning to the handbills, he (Mr. Bright) found that Mr. Purvis merely engaged to support those Conservative principles which had placed the present Administration in power. In fact, he might say in the words of the poet,

'All that we know is, nothing can be known.'

Mr. Bright then went on to show what the principles of the Ministry were, and how their present policy left the working classes in a condition of great suffering. He also referred to the condition of Ireland, and to the great bill of the session, the Irish Arms Bill. If there are still some who could for a moment doubt Mr. Bright's deep friendliness and sympathy for the Irish people, let them turn back to these words in his Durham speech, anticipatory of his later utterances :

'What is the condition of Ireland? Two millions of her children are paupers; and yet it is a magnificent island, with a soil more fertile than the country in which we live with a soil capable of producing anything, and blessed, almost above every other country, with abundance by Providence; and with a people (though I need not tell you what they are) generous, warmhearted, intelligent, honest, and virtuous, and probably, at this moment, more sober than the people of any other country in the world. What do the Irish people complain of? Of no employment, because the Conservative policy of England has destroyed the manufactures of Ireland. They complain of the Established Church in Ireland as a grievance; and so it must be admitted to be, when only one in ten of the population belong to the Church. It is just as unfair to have a Protestant establishment sweeping up the ecclesiastical revenues there, as it would be for a Romish establishment in England to sweep up all the ecclesiastical revenues of this island. The people of Ireland also believe that in the administration of the law they have not impartial justice done to them. They complain, moreover, that they are badly used by their