prove of small account in the assemblage of the gentlemen of England? Like Cobbett, he was cut off from his fellow members by class, by education, by ideas, and by his independence of party. It is difficult for us to realise the full extent of the class demarcations that subsisted then and for long afterwards. Twenty-three years after Bright's first entry into the House of Commons, at a moment when he was the most popular statesman in the land, London Society was outraged and bewildered beyond expression because Russell was known to have invited him to dinner. And London Society was closely identified with the House of Commons. If Bright had merely excelled as a mob orator, the House would have been only too glad to set him down in the list of great outsiders who had failed to pass its test. But here came the advantage of his Quaker training, his restraint, his natural good taste that only hardened in the glowing furnace of his passion, his inevitable moral ascendancy in any company in which he was found. Never popular, and always on the defensive in the House of Commons during the twenty-five years before he was sanctified by the acceptance of office, he was from first to last respected and feared by gentlemen to whom a dissenting cotton-spinner was a strange animal, but who knew a man when they saw one, and an orator when they heard one. A fine quality of the House of Commons, which it shares with any school of English boys, is the habit of judging every one within its walls, not by extraneous repute or qualification, but by his capacity for passing certain standards of the institution of which he has become a member. What precisely those standards are, it would be impertinent for any one to attempt to define who has never been on the floor of the House; but whatever they are, Bright passed them with high honours, and he was therefore allowed to tell the landlords to their faces the worst he thought of their Corn Laws, their Game Laws, and their Church establishments, and he could even find in the House, when he could find it nowhere else in the country, a hostile but respectful and admiring audience for his views on the Crimean War.

His success in the House was not obtained by flattery or by compromise. At a League banquet held at the Crown and Anchor in honour of the Durham election on the night after he had taken his seat, he described his first impressions of the scene upon which he was entering, in language prophetic of the part he was destined to play there during the next quarter of a century. Going into the House last night,' he said,

'the caution lately given me by a poor but honest Scotch

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FIRST IMPRESSIONS IN THE HOUSE

man struck me.

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He said to me, "Mr. Bright, I'll give you a piece of advice. You are going into bad company; and now that you are in, remember that you stick to what you said when you were out." "

He then continues :

'If one had dropped from the clouds upon the floor of the House and listened to the debate last night, I never should have dreamed that there was the least distress or discontent in the country. It was true that Lord John Russell made a very clever speech and some hard hits at the ministry. . . . Then came Lord Palmerston, and he made a very clever speech, if there was no country; it would have been very well at a debating club; it had some hard cuts at the ministry, interspersed with references to Afghanistan and the Ameers of Scinde, and everything but the condition of England question.'

To his sister-in-law, Margaret Priestman, he wrote on the same day (July 29): I took my seat last night at 4 o'clock. I was not in the least overawed at the position in which I was placed. The great ones of the earth are not very great after all. I felt as if I knew all about them, their schemes, their capacities and all. Therefore I felt greatly at ease. It was a mere party debate, clever but without honesty, and without earnestness.'

His maiden speech was delivered on August 7, in a debate on the Import Duties. Though he showed some nervousness in his manner during the delivery of the first sentences, his words were bold enough. He had not been on his legs half a minute before he told the House that the rich here are attended to the poor are too frequently neglected.' After a brief but powerful attack on the Corn Laws he clinched the argument with these words:

'A Commission has reported that the increase of our population is every year so great as to require for its support an annual increase of food equal to the whole produce of the county of Warwick. The Government has no power to add a county of Warwick every year to the country, neither has it power to arrest the increase of population. The consequences can neither be doubtful nor distant. . . . Twenty thousand pitmen in the North have lately met to fix the lowest price for which they will work, and the highest price they will pay for their food.

This may be wrong, but it is more tolerable than that several hundred land-owners should sit here to fix the lowest price they will take for the produce of their estates. You have been sowing curses, and now you wonder that curses have grown.'

Then, turning upon Sir Robert Peel, he began to prophesy :

'I should be glad to see the right hon. baronet not the Minister of the Queen merely, but the Minister of the people also. I should rejoice to see him disconnect himself from the party whose principles he declares to be unsound. I should be glad to see him bearing in mind the source from which he has sprung, the source of his power and wealth, as it is the source of much of the power and wealth and greatness of this Empire. He may have a laudable ambition-he may seek renown, but no man can be truly great who is content to serve an oligarchy who regard no interest but their own. I live in the manufacturing districts, I am well acquainted with the wishes and feelings of the population, and I do not hesitate to say, when I view the utter disregard with which they are treated by this House, that the dangers which impend are greater than those which now surround us.'

During the first seven years of Bright's parliamentary life, the House of Commons was not sitting either in its ancient or in its present home, but was billeted in temporary quarters. The government of Peel and the battle of the Corn Laws took place neither in the chamber that we know to-day, nor in the old St. Stephen's Chapel, whither Charles I. had come seeking the five members, where Walpole and the Pitts had borne sway, whence the Reform Bill had been sent up to the Lords. The fire of October 1834 had destroyed the old House of Commons, together with many of the other buildings of Westminster Palace, and until their present home was ready for occupation in 1850 the Commons sat in the old Court of Requests, on the site of the open space where the statue of Coeur de Lion rides to-day in so unparliamentary an attitude. Meanwhile the Lords, who had formerly sat in this same Court of Requests, moved to the old Painted Chamber until their new home was ready for them in 1847.

During the autumn and winter of 1843 the wind sat in the sails of the League. Its candidates continued to carry by

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elections of which the most important involved the capture of the City in October. London at first had lagged behind the provinces, but the Leaguers, to use their favourite expression, had invaded' the capital in 1842-43. Some hundreds of meetings had been held, including the monster demonstrations every month in Covent Garden Opera House, where John Bright and William Fox delivered urbi et orbi their greatest efforts of oratory, still to be read word for word in the files of the old League newspaper. The City magnates at length began to subscribe to the League when the £100,000 Fund was opened in the autumn. In these circumstances, the death of one of the members for London gave the Free Traders an opportunity for a display of their growing power. On October 2 Bright, from London, writes to Cobden at Manchester:

'It is of first necessity that thou and I should work together incessantly for the City Election. Come up to-morrow night, if possible. Tell the [Manchester] Athenæum people that the matter is the all-important one and that provincials must yield to it. Come up we must do it, if it be done. And Repeal is not far off when this election is won. No one dare afterwards contest a Borough against the League. Le jour viendra. I have not been in bed for two nights, but am not much tired.'

After nearly a month of such personal exertions by the chiefs of the League, their candidate, Pattison, was elected for the City by 6535 against Protectionist Baring's 6334.

The position of another member for the City, Lord John Russell, still bound to his fixed duty' formula, was now none of the most pleasant, especially when the heads of some of the great Whig families, without waiting for his lead, declared for complete Free Trade-in December 1843 Lord Morpeth, in the following June Lord Howick. In January 1844 the Marquis of Westminster sent £500 to the League funds.

While a powerful minority of the upper and landlord class was thus coming round to Free Trade, and the farmers were weakening in their opposition, the working men were becoming more and more unanimous and enthusiastic. The bankruptcy of the extreme Chartist opposition to the League was brought home to all democratic politicians by the events of August 5, 1844, when Cobden and Bright met Feargus O'Connor and his lieutenant McGrath on a platform at Northampton, and disputed with them before an audience of 6000 persons. When Cobden

made his motion, the Chartists put forward their amendment, a clumsy compromise between the Protectionists and Free Traders in their body, to the effect that the Corn Laws were bad laws, but that their repeal would be injurious, if it took place before the enfranchisement of the working class, because it would make the middle class masters of the State. As the Tories present voted with the O'Connorites, the majority against this amendment was small, but the weight of argument in the discussion had, by the admission of all present, been so entirely on the side of Cobden and Bright that O'Connor's waning influence with the working men was almost destroyed by the encounter.1

Nevertheless 1844 was, superficially, a year of set-back for the League. All the great currents beneath were turning to swell the tide of Free Trade, but the surface was ruffled by a contrary breeze. Yet the breeze was of happy omen, for it was the wind of prosperity. A series of good harvests in England brought wheat down in 1843-45 to an average of little more than 50 shillings a quarter; trade had recovered, partly owing to the good harvests, and partly as a result of the Free Trade measures of Peel's budget of 1842. The consequent retreat of the shadow of famine from the homes of the working men, and the release of their employers from the instant fear of bankruptcy, illustrated on behalf of the League the benefits of low corn prices and of Free Trade measures, but at the same time removed the necessity for immediate rebellion against the existing system of Corn Laws. As the state of the country improved, there was a strengthening of old party ties at the expense of the League. At several by-elections in rural districts and small country towns the Free Traders failed in 1844 to repeat the successes of the previous year. 'We are sadly bothered with these elections in places where no such thing as freedom to vote exists,' wrote Bright to his sisterin-law. These small constituencies 2 in no degree tell what public opinion is, and yet they must be contested and in most cases without success.' The local Whigs, so Bright wrote to Duncan McLaren, generally refused to support the League candidates, whom they regarded as interlopers, and so left the humbler voters exposed to the vengeance of the squires in counties, and in small towns to the various forms of intimida

1 Cf. Gammage's Chartist Movement, 253-55, to the League, August 10, 1844. The elections to which this letter refers were at Christchurch, where the Protectionists won by 180 votes to 84; and at Hastings, where they won by 511 to 169.