1866] JOHN BRIGHT AND ROBERT LOWE Discussing whether he can scan and understand the lines -་ About the wooden Horse of Troy, and when and where he dines : Though gentlemen should blush to talk as if they cared a button Because one night in Chesham Place he ate his slice of mutton. Since ever party strife began the world is still the same, 355 Who twenty centuries ago was waving Gladstone's banner : A block of rugged Saxon oak, that shews no light impression; Then surely it were best to drop an over-worried bone, And blindly take one course because John Bright prefers another.' John Bright was a match for Lowe in oratory, and in that kind of chaff which goes down best with the House of Commons. His jokes were not too frequent and they invariably came off. Even the Conservative Opposition and Mr. Lowe himself were laughing aloud during his Cave of Adullam' speech of March 13. On that night, when he coined the happy phrase for the Liberal dissentient body, it as yet consisted only of the quarrelsome Horsman and the fiery Lowe. Bright complained that certain Members returned from Australia took a Botany Bay view of the great bulk of their countrymen,' and by their abuse of the working men did far more than he had ever done to set class against class.' "The right hon. gentleman below me [Mr. Horsman] said a little against the Government and a little against the Bill, but had last night a field-night for an attack upon so humble an individual as myself. The right hon. gentleman is the first of the new party who has expressed his great grief, who has retired into what may be called his political Cave of Adullam, and he has called about him every one that was in distress, and every one that was discontented.1 The right hon. gentleman has been anxious to form a party in this House. There is scarcely any one on this side of the House who is able to address the House with effect, or to take much part in our debates, whom he has not tried to bring over to his party or cabal; and at last the right hon. gentleman has succeeded in hooking the right hon. gentleman the member for Calne [Lowe]. I know there was an opinion expressed many years ago by a member of the Treasury Bench and of the Cabinet, that two men would make a party. When a party is formed of two men so amiable, so discreet, as the two right hon. gentlemen, we may hope to see for the first time in Parliament a party perfectly harmonious and distinguished by mutual and unbroken trust. But there is one difficulty which it is impossible to remove. This party of two reminds me of the Scotch terrier, which was so covered with hair that you could not tell which was the head and which was the tail of it.' The House broke out into a storm of laughter at the Scotch terrier. But as the days went by, it was soon clear that Lowe's end of the terrier contained the head, and a good one too. And ere long the Cave of Adullam ' had more than two inhabitants. Bright was soon writing in his private letters of the 'forty traitors' and the forty thieves.' The cave' was inhabited very largely by men, like Lord Grosvenor, well known in London society, of which the House of Commons was still almost as much the heart and centre as it had been in the days of the Walpoles. It was a marked thing if a great noble did not put his son into the House, whether as Whig or Tory. The younger men on the Government side in the Parliament of 1865-68 were most of them of established social position, and generally speaking not of any very marked ability. It was only the following Parliament, the first elected after the passage of the Reform Bill, that displayed a changed social tone in the House, and introduced a whole troop of able Liberals marked out for future prominence-like Henry Campbell [Bannerman], William Harcourt, Wilfred Lawson, A. J. Mundella, Charles Dilke, and Henry James. Though Lowe himself was no more an aristocrat than Burke, his Adullamites The French scientific historian, M. Seignobos, has thus explained to his fellow-countrymen the strange political term coined by Bright: Allusion à un passage de la Bible. Adullam avait voulu tuer David.' (Hist. Politique de l'Europe Contemporaine, 1897, p. 60.) 1866] THE CAVE DESTROYS THE MINISTRY 357 were for the most part a last rally of aristocrats of the Whig decadence. After a long losing battle, the Government was defeated on the anniversary of Waterloo, by eleven votes, in favour of an amendment that destroyed the first principle of their Reform Bill. Bright wished the Government to follow the precedent of Earl Grey in similar circumstances in 1831, and appeal to the electorate. On June 24 he wrote to Mr. Gladstone : 'I have thought much of our last conversation and remain confirmed in my opinion that the true policy is to have a new Parliament. Resignation I only dread, or dread chiefly, in the fear that the Tory Government if formed might conspire with the "40 thieves" to force a Reform Bill which would be worse than nothing. Mr. Brand [the Whip] makes no allowance for the moral force of a contest through the country for a great principle and a great cause. Besides there is something far worse than a defeat, namely, to carry on your Government with a party poisoned and enfeebled by the baseness of the 40 traitors.' The fears of the great Whip of facing a dissolution with a divided party prevailed over Bright's more heroic advice. But at least the fatal snare of trying to carry on the Government without dissolution was avoided, and Earl Russell's Cabinet resigned. Another Derby-Disraeli Government was formed, but it was not joined by Lowe and his Adullamites. There was therefore still hope for Reform, since Benjamin Disraeli's mind was more plastic than Robert Lowe's. If outside pressure analogous to that of the Anti-Corn Law League could during the recess be brought to bear on the new Ministry, Disraeli and Derby might do that for doing which they had destroyed Peel-they might take the statesmanlike course and settle a great question by a great surrender. It is here that we take leave of Earl Russell as an active politician. He never again took office. With the exception of Peel, Bright approved more of Russell, personally and politically, than of any other official statesman' prior to the neo-Gladstonian era now commencing. Russell had done almost as much to hasten the transition of old Whig to modern Liberal as Palmerston had done to retard it. His personal friendliness to Bright had been more unbroken than Bright's personal friendliness to him. For John Bright always tended towards the sterner view of familiarity between political opponents, namely, that it is difficult to attack in public a man with whom the orator consorts much in private. Their personal relations at the end were, however, most cordial, largely, no doubt, because Russell in June 1866 resigned rather than abandon Reform as he had abandoned it in 1861. A pleasant picture of these two great Liberals in the sunset of their lives is given in the following letter of Bright to his wife in the summer of 1875: Yesterday I went to Richmond and drove two miles to Pembroke Lodge, where I found the old Statesman [Russell]. He seemed really glad to see me; he said, "I have read your speeches with great pleasure"; I replied, "and I have read your book with much interest," to which he added, laughing," and so we compliment each other." We talked a little on public matters. I told him the Palestine Explorers have discovered the "Cave of Adullam," which amused him very much.' There was more than mere political agreement in John Bright's feeling towards him; two days after Russell's death he wrote to Lady Russell: 'What I particularly observed in the public life of Lord John-you once told me you liked his former name and title-was a moral tone, a conscientious feeling, something higher and better than is often found in the guiding principles of our most active statesmen; and for this I always admired and reverenced him.' 1866] BRIGHT COERCES THE GOVERNMENT 359 CHAPTER XVII BRIGHT'S CAMPAIGN IN THE COUNTRY, 1866. THE CONSERVATIVE SURRENDER. DISRAELI'S REFORM BILL, 1867 'I speak not the language of party. I feel myself above the level of party. I speak, as I have endeavoured to speak, on behalf of the unenfranchised, the almost voiceless millions of my countrymen. Their claim is just, and it is constitutional. It will be heard. It cannot be rejected. To the outward eye, monarchs and Parliaments seem to rule with an absolute and unquestioned sway, but-and I quote the words which one of our old Puritan poets has left for us "There is on earth a yet auguster thing, Veiled though it be, than Parliament or King." That auguster thing is the tribunal which God has set up in the consciences of men. It is before that tribunal that I am now permitted humbly to plead, and there is something in my heart—a small but an exultant voicewhich tells me I shall not plead in vain.'-BRIGHT at Birmingham, Dec. 1865. IN July 1866 Derby and Disraeli came into office because their party had, with the help of Lowe's 'Cave of Adullam,' defeated Gladstone's very moderate Reform Bill. In the spring and summer of 1867 they presided as Ministers over the enfranchisement of the working men in the towns on the basis of household suffrage, a scheme far more extensive than that which they had successfully opposed as revolutionary in the preceding year. The only events that occurred in the interim to account for so great a change of mood in the Conservative party, were half a dozen vast gatherings, amounting between them to a million people, of whom fractions commensurate with the powers of the human voice were addressed by John Bright. Peaceful demonstrations that could persuade the Conservative party against its will that the working men were dangerously in earnest about Reform, must have been of a very remarkable kind. They were, in fact, the fitting culmination of Bright's career, and brought about the final triumph of the policy that he had advocated for twenty years, through those peaceable but forceful methods of agitation by which, ever since the |