1870] SECOND LONG ILLNESS 411 CHAPTER XIX IN AND OUT OF OFFICE. THE EASTERN QUESTION. DEATH OF MRS. BRIGHT. 1870-78 'I have had my part in some great questions, and other parts must be left for other men. The County Franchise and the Land Question are coming to the front. I could advise upon them, but cannot enter again into great conflicts.'-BRIGHT to CHAS. VILLIERS, Dec. 1872. 'The history of the last forty years of this country is mainly a history of the conquests of freedom. It will be a grand volume that tells the story, and your name and mine, if I mistake not, will be found in some of its pages. For me, the final chapter is now writing. It may be already written; but for you, this great constituency, you have a perpetual youth and a perpetual future. I pray Heaven that in the years to come, when my voice is hushed, you may be granted strength, and moderation and wisdom to influence the councils of your country by righteous means, for none other than noble and righteous ends.'-BRIGHT to his Birmingham constituents, Oct. 1873. BRIGHT's second long illness, which removed him from public life in February 1870, though he did not actually resign until December, was of the same nature as his illness of 1856, but it was even more severe. He was an older man, and in addition to the nervous break-down' there were grave threatenings of an apoplectic seizure. He remained in a critical condition of physical weakness all the summer. His second daughter, Mary, who was with him during the worst of his illness, wrote: 'He was hardly able to walk without assistance, unable to read or even to sign his name for a long time, although his brain remained perfectly clear and unharmed, sharing for the time in the general feebleness, but nothing more. He always enjoyed being read to, and during those weary months he became acquainted with many of the best novels for the first time. Every fine day he was lifted on to a quiet Welsh pony, and with wife or daughter rode at a walking pace for more than two hours on the sands or 1 Like every one else of his generation, he had grown up with Scott and Dickens. He had also read some of Disraeli and of other novelists, but he preferred poetry and history. in the quiet lanes round Llandudno. In this way he used often to visit a lonely cottage under the Welsh hills where for twenty years a poor little woman had lain in a bed as small as a child's cot, too crippled by disease in her joints to move anything but her head; entirely dependent on a husband out all day and a neighbour who came in once or twice to move and feed her. Her one companion was "Robin," a devoted collie, who would sit in the lane listening for the horse's feet and then run in to tell his mistress who was coming. My father always carried a packet of bones for "Robin" and some little comfort for the invalid, and would sit on his pony at the open door talking to the occupant of the cot with the deformed and shrunken figure and the bright eager eyes. Her cheerfulness under the terrible conditions of her life, and above all, the look in her face, which is only given by an abiding and sustaining faith, were lessons not to be forgotten. My father often said he left that cottage "humbled yet uplifted." He never forgot her, and continued to care for her in various substantial ways till she died.' In May 1871 he was well enough to go to Scotland, where he remained until the autumn. He caught a good many fish, as his letters testify, but he writes : I do not really care much about the fishing; whether I get anything or nothing on any particular day is much the same; I get the exercise and am content, and if I get no fish, I have not killed any creature living in these Highland waters, which ought to be reckoned something in the whole question. 'Scotland would be a much less interesting country without its dogs, the collies and terriers; they seem to have the virtues without the vices of the "superior animal," and I like them very much.' Dogs played a large part in his home life. So did a grey parrot, who was taught by the rising generation to interrupt the master of the house by the disconcerting remark, John Bright, let it drop,'-a phrase which he himself often employed to put a term to discussion. One day the bird opened its cage, flew away, and was lost for a considerable time. Finally it was picked up in the town and restored to One Ash, because it plaintively explained to the crowd that it was 'John Bright's Polly.' 1871-73] FEELING FOR GLADSTONE 413 In April 1872 he resumed his seat in the House of Commons. But he dared not make the effort to address his Birmingham constituents until October 1873, upon his return to office in Gladstone's reconstructed Cabinet, now drifting fast to its doom. He became Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. There were not the same strong reasons for rejoining the Government in 1873 as there had been for his original acceptance of office in 1868. But his better judgment was overcome by a chivalrous feeling for Gladstone in distress. It is difficult to believe that he would have accepted office again under any other chief. ‘I never made a greater sacrifice,' he wrote to Mr. Thomasson of Bolton, but I could not desert Gladstone. Don't blame me; I am, perhaps, more deserving of pity.' It is doubtful whether a man who thinks he is to be 'pitied' for taking office is fit to discharge its duties. The truth was that he felt deep gratitude to Gladstone for having passed his programme into law, and changed the party from Whig to Liberal. And he was further bound to him by the common element of idealism in their natures and the belief which they shared that religious or ethical principles should guide nations as well as men. So Bright readily forgave Gladstone for the faults of the Education Bill, or rather he continued to lay them to the account of others. His letters at this period contain severe expressions about Mr. Forster, but none about Mr. Gladstone. He made allowance for the fact that Mr. Gladstone had been born and bred a Churchman. He was now a frequent guest at Hawarden, sympathetic with all except the outward and visible signs of the inward and spiritual grace which he found there. In September 1873 he notes in his journal: Hawarden. To Church. Service high. Three par Mr. Gladstone most earnest in the singing, etc. To me much of the service seemed only fitted for a very ignorant people.' In these later years one of Bright's most famous speeches in the House was a very moving appeal for the rights of dissenters in public cemeteries, made in the debate on the Burials Bill. In the course of it he said: "The Friends' burial-grounds have not been-what do they call it ?-consecrated,' at which some Members laughed, and Bishop Magee in the Gallery was scandalised, and subsequently protested that Bright had sneered at consecration. Bright wrote him the following explanatory letter: 'DEAR BISHOP OF PETERBOROUGH,—I have read your speech, and write to make one correction in it. You refer to my speech on the Burials Bill, to which you give too much praise, but you condemn what you term the "sneer intended in my mention of the ceremony of "consecration." I assure you there was no sneer intended. The speech was entirely unpremeditated. I had no intention of saying anything on the question when I went down to the House, and what I said arose from feelings excited during the debate. When I came to the word "consecration,' it entirely escaped me, and for the moment I could not recall it. In my difficulty I turned to my friends on the bench near me and said, "What is it called?" or, "What do they call it?" One or more of them answered "Consecration," and one or more laughed, I suppose, at my ignorance or forgetfulness, and this laugh, which was somewhat ill-timed, made that seem a sneer which was never so intended by me. 66 'You will not blame me if I do not believe in the virtue of consecration." I cannot believe in what is called "holy ground" any more than you can believe in "holy water,' ,"1 and for the same reason, that there is nothing in it; but it is not necessary to ridicule all that one cannot believe, although it is certain that ridicule has had its share in clearing the world of some portions of the superstitions which have misled and afflicted it.' (Nov. 1877.) In London on Sunday he regularly throughout his life attended the Friends' Meeting in Westminster, and seldom omitted in writing to his wife later in the day to give the names of those who had offered prayer or spoken, often adding a brief summary of what had been said, with comments. He continued always to take a thoughtful interest in the doings of the Society both in the conduct of its business and in the position it took up on many public questions, with which as a rule he was in complete sympathy. He always remained a Friend both in his heart and in his life. The words spoken to his Birmingham constituents on his return to office in 1873,2 as well as his private letters, show that John Bright regarded his main work in life as finished. He had now become, and he remained until the end, the most revered and the most generally loved figure in politics; but after 1869 he was no longer one of the three leading men in the country. Indeed, he altogether ceased to lead. I cannot,' he wrote, 1 The Bishop was a noted evangelical. 1871-73] BRIGHT'S WORK ACCOMPLISHED 415 'enter again into great conflicts.' In 1876, when a newspaper man attempted to fasten an interview' upon him, he would say nothing except, 'I am now on the shelf and am not before the public. This attitude can be attributed partly to advancing years and the diminution of his physical and nervous energy after his second illness; and in part to the fact that the great causes to which he had devoted his life were accomplished. The Liberal Ministers, who had entered office with such reforming zeal at the end of 1868, were in 1872 nicknamed by Disraeli 'a range of exhausted volcanoes,' but meanwhile their lava had fairly covered the land below: they had disestablished the Irish Church, passed the Irish Land Act, set up-however imperfectly-national Education, abolished Purchase in the Army, opened the universities to dissenters, and established the ballot at elections. These changes, together with the earlier boons of Free Trade, Household Franchise in the towns, and the abolition of Church-rates, and above all, the withdrawal of England from European entanglements, constituted a nearly complete adoption of Bright's programme. He was too old to launch a new programme, to investigate new principles more suited to the coming age, or even to fight with his old vigour for what still remained to be done on the principles of his youth. He never again took up a great cause and made it his own. Many of his later speeches-still beautiful in their literary form-are reminiscences, or rejoicings over battles won and progress registered. His position was that of veteran attached to the party, half retired and continually talking of retiring altogether, but never making up his mind to go. In a less unselfish man this state of things would soon have become intolerable to himself or to his colleagues. But his entire indifference to his own 'position' in the party made his presence there welcome to all the warring sections and rival personalities in the distracted Liberal fold. In Bright's letters of the 'seventies and 'eighties there is a remarkable absence of talk about intrigues, though these were plentiful enough among the Liberals of that era. One did not go to John Bright when one had an intrigue on hand. At the General Election of 1874 the Liberals, divided and discontented, were defeated by Disraeli's hosts, united as good Conservatives should be on the programme of doing nothing. Gladstone abandoned public life, and Bright thought his retirement a very great catastrophe. 'As to your successor,' he wrote to him in January 1875, |