PAGE 8
John Bright
by
The farmers were in opposition to the League, being told by the landlords that if breadstuffs were allowed to come into the United Kingdom free, the tillers of the soil would be made bankrupt.
Cobden was a ready speaker, and his knowledge of history and economics commanded respect, but Bright’s oratory went to their hearts. Bright had a touch of the true Methodist fervor which won the hearer without making too much of a demand on his intellect.
Shortly after Cobden and Bright made their alliance, Cobden ran for Parliament and was elected. “The one thing that formed the pivotal point, and won the farmers, as well as the men of Manchester, was the oratory of John Bright,” said Gladstone. The term “Manchester men” was flung at Cobden and Bright, and stuck. It meant that they were merely manufacturers, neither scholars nor gentlemen. Bright had modified the severity of the Quaker costume, but wore the soft, gray colors with hat to match, “because,” said his enemies, “it is so effective.”
Cobden being now in the House of Commons, Bright called himself “Secretary of the Exterior,” and often fought the good fight alone, speaking on an average three nights a week, and the rest of the time attending to his business.
Two years after Cobden’s election, Bright was obliged to purchase a suit of solemn black and a chimney-pot hat, for he, too, had been chosen a member of the House of Commons.
“Another Manchester man–I do declare, you know, it will be a convention of bagmen, yet!” remarked Sir Robert Peel, as he adjusted his monocle. Peel, however, grew to have a very wholesome respect for the Manchester men. They could neither be bribed, bought nor bullied. They had money enough to free them from temptation, and they could think on their feet. They were in the minority, but it was a minority that could not be snubbed nor subdued.
The total repeal of the Corn Laws came in Eighteen Hundred Forty-nine, but not until both Cobden and Bright had been threatened with criminal proceedings for inciting revolution. However, the ministry backed down, the new era came, and proved to be one of peace and great prosperity.
John Bright worked for humanity. To his voice, more than to any other, Ireland owes her freedom from the “Establishment.”
He struggled to free England from the clutch of the Established Church, but admitted at last that it would require time to unloose the grip of the clergy from their perquisites. Always and forever he argued and voted against war, or any increase of armament, even when he stood alone. And once he forfeited his seat for a term by going against the popular cry for blood. John Bright is a good example of a man with the study habit. Not only did he carry on a great private business, and at the same time bear heavy burdens in the management of his country’s affairs, but he was always a student, always a learner, and also always a teacher. Neither he nor Richard Cobden ever divorced ethics from business, religion from work, nor life from education.
John Bright possessed a sterling honesty, a perennial good-cheer, and always and forever a tender, sympathetic heart. These things seemed to spring naturally, easily and gently from his nature; they were the habits of his life. And having acquired good habits his judgment was almost uniformly correct; his actions manly; his temper considerate; his opinion right. Private business was to John Bright a public trust. He, of all men, knew that the only way to help one’s self is to help others.
During our Civil War, John Bright sided with the North, and fired his broadsides of scorn at the many in the House of Commons who hoped and prayed that the United States would no longer be united.
In Eighteen Hundred Sixty-eight, under Gladstone as Premier, Bright was chosen President of the Board of Trade, being the first Quaker to hold a Cabinet office.
John Bright was a rich man, and his life proves what riches can do when rightly used. That his example of absolute honesty and adherence to principle sets him apart as a character luminous and unique is and indictment of the times in which we live.
John Bright’s energy, eloquence, purity of conduct, sincerity of purpose, his freedom from petty quarrels, his unselfishness, his lofty ideals, his noble discontent and prophetic outlook, have tinted the entire zeitgeist, and are discovering for us that Utopia is here now, if we will but have it so.