1841]

DEATH OF HIS WIFE

On the 10th of September he wrote to Cobden :

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'It has pleased the Almighty to take from me my beloved and cherished companion. She sank peacefully to her rest about one o'clock this day. She had almost no suffering, and death to her had long lost his terrors. Until she became mine, I did not know that mortality ever was the abode of so much that was pure and lovely. Her sainted spirit I cannot doubt is now an inhabitant of that city "where none can say he is sick," and in this deep affliction my heart rejoices in the full assurance that to my precious wife the change is inconceivably glorious. 'I know thou wilt sympathise with me in this very deep trial, and it is therefore I write to inform thee of it. 'I hope this may reach thee before thou leaves to

morrow."

On the 13th Cobden was at Leamington, at his friend's side, bringing with him, as was his custom, not the mere balm of comfortable talk, but a plan to aid the stricken. The story has been told once for all in Bright's own words.1

1877.

'At that time I was at Leamington, and on the day when Mr. Cobden called upon me-for he happened to be there at the time on a visit to some relatives-I was in the depths of grief, I might almost say of despair, for the light and sunshine of my house had been extinguished. All that was left on earth of my young wife, except the memory of a sainted life, and a too brief happiness, was lying still and cold in the chamber above us. Mr. Cobden called upon me as his friend, and addressed me, as you might suppose, with words of condolence. After a time he looked up and said, "There are thousands of houses in England at this moment where wives, mothers, and children are dying of hunger. Now," he said, "when the first paroxysm of your grief is past, I would advise you to come with me, and we will never rest till the Corn Law is repealed." I accepted his invitation. I knew that the description he had given of the homes of thousands was not an exaggerated description. I felt in my conscience ✓ that there was a work which somebody must do, and therefore I accepted his invitation, and from that time we never ceased to labour hard on behalf of the resolution

Bright's speech at the unveiling of Cobden's statue. Bradford, July 25,

which we had made. Now, do not suppose that I wish you to imagine that he and I, when I say "we," were the only persons engaged in this great question. We were not even the first, though afterwards, perhaps, we became the foremost before the public. But there were others before us; and we were joined, not by scores, but by hundreds, and afterwards by thousands, and afterwards by countless multitudes; and afterwards famine itself, against which we had warred, joined us; and a great minister was converted, and minorities became majorities, and finally the barrier was entirely thrown down. And since then, though there has been suffering, and much suffering, in many homes in England, yet no wife and no mother and no little child has been starved to death as the result of a famine made by law.'

Meanwhile, through no fault of Corn Laws, one little child was motherless and one man forlorn.

THE VICTORIAN ERA

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CHAPTER III

'THE CONDITION OF ENGLAND QUESTION ’

'We, your petitioners, dwell in a land whose merchants are noted for their enterprise, whose manufacturers are very skilful, and whose workmen are proverbial for their industry. The land itself is goodly, the soil rich, and the temperature wholesome. It is abundantly furnished with materials of commerce and trade; it has numerous and convenient harbours; in facility of internal communication it exceeds all others. For three-and-twenty years we have enjoyed a profound peace. Yet, with all these elements of national prosperity, and with every disposition and capacity to take advantage of them, we find ourselves overwhelmed with public and private suffering. We are bowed down under a load of taxes; our traders are trembling on the verge of bankruptcy; our workmen are starving; capital brings no profit and labour no remuneration; the home of the artificer is desolate, and the warehouse of the pawnbroker is full; the workhouse is crowded, and the manufactory is deserted. We have looked on every side, we have searched diligently in order to find out the causes of a distress so sore and so long continued. We can discover none in nature or in Providence. Heaven has dealt graciously by the people; but the foolishness of our rulers has made the goodness of God of none effect.'

Chartist Petition to the House of Commons, 1838-39.

At the time of Queen Victoria's accession, a prophecy that the new reign would come to be regarded in the retrospect as a period of domestic peace and plenty, and of progress in the wellbeing of the people, would have seemed to the then starving millions a mockery of their distress. Yet, in the course of that memorable reign, real wages, that is wages measured by their purchasing power, very nearly doubled, and the Victorian era became a synonym for economic and social progress. John Bright was a living force in the work of elevating the condition and status of the masses. The significance of his life, otherwise than as a series of speeches delivered, derives from 'the condition of England question,' as Carlyle in 1840 dolefully called it, and in particular from those parts of the question with which Bright concerned himself as an agitator-the landlord power, the Corn Laws, and the franchise.

LIFE OF JOHN BRIGHT

It is a law of human affairs that monopoly of power leads to its abuse. But the evils of the system that concentrated local and central authority in the hands of the landlord class had been kept within bounds and concealed from the eye by much that was gracious, in the period before the French Revolution and the contemporary industrial revolution' in England. In a society mainly agricultural like that of the eighteenth century, the country gentlemen would in any case have been the leaders of the nation, even if they had not acquired an almost formal monopoly of power. And in the age of Reynolds and Gibbon our aristocracy was what aristocracies always claim to be but very seldom are, the diligent and successful patrons of art, letters, and intellect. In politics half the oligarchy were engaged in defending the 'liberties of the subject' against King George III. The Whig aristocrats discoursed of Brutus and Hampden, and thought of themselves as the leading citizens of a free country. There was a breath of liberty about the England of Chatham, unlike the hothouse atmosphere of Versailles or the parade-ground where Frederick surveyed his grenadiers.

But these pleasant times and picturesque attitudes passed away before the end of the century. The potentialities of evil latent in the landlord monopoly of power became manifest when the industrial revolution came to its crisis. able miseries of the period of transition from the old to the new economic order in town and village were enhanced, not only The inevitby a twenty years' war with the French Revolution, but by the fact that all power in Britain was in the hands of one class. The country gentlemen, as any other class would have done in similar circumstances, used the power of the State to supervise the economic changes, not a little in their own interest.

It was indeed necessary to enclose much village and common land in order to grow food for the rapidly increasing population of the island, prior to the development of the great sources of food-supply oversea. But the enclosures were effected by the landlord Parliament with but slight consideration for the property of the many and the interests of the poor, as Arthur Young himself confessed. The peasants lost through the Enclosure Acts their ancient right over the land, without receiving any permanent compensation; and this unhappily took place during the very years marked by the destruction of the peasants' village industries owing to the invention of machines, and the consequent transference of manufacture to specialised centres of industry. Thus deprived at once of

his two sources of independence, and ruined by war taxes and prices, the villager became the landless hireling of the big tenant-farmer and landlord. If the peasant refused to serve the farmer at starvation wages, he could only move to the town. But there he was equally at the mercy of the manufacturer, in those hard days when there were no effective Factory Acts, and when trade unions were punished as illegal associations. The happy truth that short hours and good wages would produce better work, was still hidden from mankind. One half of the accepted political economy of the day taught the educated classes to believe that self-interest and ruthless competition were the true philanthropy, and that starvation was Nature's discipline for a people who would breed too fast. Such doctrine fell gratefully on the ears of enclosing landlords and sweating manufacturers, who paid scant attention to the other half of the school of wisdom from which they quoted, for as yet they eschewed free trade. They practised all that was harshest in 'the dismal science,' and left all that was good in it unheeded.

This marked retrogression in the physical and moral state of the people, of which, in spite of much subsequent reform, the inherited effects have by no means yet disappeared from our midst, was largely the result of the twenty years' war against the French Revolution. Our national glories were paid for not only by a debt burdening posterity, but by taxation that raised to starvation prices nearly everything men required. At the same time Napoleon cut us off from the wheat supplies of the Continent. The knowledge of what that war had meant to the mass of the people while it lasted, and the legacy of misery and degradation that it left behind, was burnt into the soul of Bright, and reinforced by its modern example the faith of his peace-loving forefathers. His view of the unnecessary character of the war begun in 1793 may be wrongor it may be right; but his grasp on the fact that war though sometimes sport to the rich is always death to the poor, was to stand England in good stead in coming years.

Economic misery and loss of social independence were accompanied by political reaction. The privileged classes over here would have been more than human if they had not taken alarm at the French Revolution. From Shakespeare's cliff could be descried the shores of a land where the country houses were being sacked by the villagers, where the quality were hiding in garrets or perishing on the scaffold, where hares and pheasants were being knocked on the head like vermin.