“THE LIFE OF JOHN BRIGHT.”

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXV, Issue 1154, 4 October 1913, Page 4

“THE LIFE OF JOHN BRIGHT.”

THE ENGLISH REVIEW ON THE GREAT RADICAL-

The" English Review has a very notable article on Mr Trevelyan’s “Life of John Bright” (Constable, London). It says that the author has a hearty admiration tor Bright, makes the utmost of the many respectable and creditable things he did, and has the greatest difficulty in finding that he was ever in the wrong, which he was, not infrequently, through the perverse limitation of his outlook. How could a man really understand England who regarded with mere resentment and disgust half the formative and controlling elements in the life of Britain, the Church, the landed interest, the whole aristocratic and country gentleman class, the army, the navy, the colonies, the universities, the public schools, not to mention the whole body of those whom he lumped together as the “Tories.” Nor does it appear that he bad much real acquaintance with the working masses, or a genuine sympathy with their aims and sentiments, though he had a kindly desire that they should get enough to eat and drink, and be well clothed and provided with cheap books as well as with cheap boots. He spoke of himself at times as a democrat; but his democracy manifested itself chiefly in a great dislike to lords and bishops and other socially-privi-leged persons. And no doubt there was still plenty to be done between the ’thirties and the ’seventies in sweeping away privileges and inequalities of all kinds, from the pocket boroughs and the Corn Laws to the theological tests for degrees at Oxford.

The Manchester men were splendid for this sort of work, and Bright was the best of all ; lor here, at any rate, he embodied popular aspirations, he really did represent the awakened democracy ot the great industrial towns in their revolt against aristocratic and territorial feudalism, and the influence of London society, and he could express what they fell with poetic and prophetic fervour. The passion which had been simmering in the breasts of the British middle classes, Puritans, Nonconformists, Quakers, Cougregationalists, Presbyterians, through a century and a half of Anglican, Wbigglsh, and oligarchical predominance, found voice when John Bright set the trumpet to his lips and blew. He was the inspired preacher of a people who, be it remembered, had been trained by six generations of sermons, whose only literature had been that authorised version of the Bible which Bright knew by heart, whose only real conception of a hero was that ot an idol-breaker. Bright was always breaking idols, constantly (at least, in the best and most truitlul part of his career) calling upon the Lord to shatter false gods, denouncing the golden calves and the graven images of the heatheu who worshipped at the altars of protection, militarism, franchise monopoly. He was the apostle of that triumphant, middle-class Protestantism which at length had its revenge in the nineteenth century for the persecutions of the seventeenth, and the social intolerance and political proscriptions of the eighteenth. It leaped into the saddle rejoicing exceedingly over its own achievements, and no doubt honestly believing that it had emancipated the people from the fetters of the ages by the process of giving free rein to the individualistic spirit. What it did not see, or preferred not to recognise, was that this aggravated individualism was particularly advantageous to its own class, and of very much smaller value to any other. Bright, with all bis kindliness and charity, never really seems to have suspected that there was anything fundamentally wrong in the organisation of society as it prevailed at Rochdale.

That a few capitalists and manufacturers should roll up their fortunes year by year, while the bulk of the industrial population toiled on for a little more than a bare subsistence, did not strike him as an unnatural or apparently an undesirable arrangement, provided that the toilers got their food cheap and were allowed to “better themselves” if they could. That they never would substantially better themselves by free and open competition in the labour market did not occur to him ; still less than educated proletariat endowed with political power would spsedily'seek for itself a larger share of the amenities, and even the luxuries of life which were showered upon other classes. This was the cause of Bright’s quarrel with the Chartists, then with the Young Englanders and Conserva-

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live reformers who got the Factory Acts through in the teeth of his opposition, and finally with the latter day Liberals of bis old age, from whom he became widely estranged. There was more vision and insight into the coudition-of-England question in Disraeli’s “Sybil” than in all Bright’s speeches; and if Bright had lived down to the twentieth century era he would probably have found salvation beside Lord Cromer and Lord Courteney, perhaps in the same august assembly which they adorn. Indeed, Sir Henry Camp-bell-Bannerman’s famous dictum about the thirteen millions on the verge of starvation is in itself a condemnation, which Bright himself would never have uttered, ol the middle-classs Parliamentarians who had in the main ruled England for the previous 60 years. Nor did Bright properly grasp the situation of Britain in the inter national sphere. He saw that the Crimean War was a foolish blunder, and he had the courage to say so in despite of public opin' ion ; be knew that there was s great deal of mere frothy confusior in the whole Palmerstouiau foreigt policy. But he was too ignoran of history, and two contemptuou; of its lessons, to understand tha an Island State, dependent for it! very existence on commerce auc imported food, could not survey the international chessboard will serene indifference. The Man Chester school would have beer invincible if all the world had beet like Manchester, which was fa from being the case. But.it bar its place in tbeevo’ution of moden English society and politics, bridg ing over the gap between th breakdown of oligarchical govern ment and the era of reconstruclioi on a genuine democratic basis Bright was its most remarkabl figure, personally an estimabl man, brave, honourable, virtuous and with a fine old English pas sion for righteousness. Mr Tre velyan has done him a little mor than justice ; but his biography i a skilful piece of work, smooth! written and carefully “docu mented,” and it is a living, well modelled portrait of the grea orator of the older Radicalism tha we get from bis pages.