MARKREE LIBRARY. 
 
 Shelf 
 
 Block. 
 
 Re-arranged in 1013 by BRYAN COOPER
 
 UBBAI&
 
 Ex Librig 
 C. K. OGDEN 
 
 SPEECHES 
 
 PARLIAMENTARY REFORM, Ac,, 
 
 JOHN BRIGHT, ESQ., M.P.; 
 
 DELIVERED DURING THE AUTUMN OF 1866, 
 TO THE PEOPLE OF 
 
 ENGLAND, SCOTLAND, AND IRELAND, AT BIRMINGHAM, 
 
 MANCHESTER, LEEDS, GLASGOW, DUBLIN, 
 
 AND LONDON. 
 
 REVISED BY HIMSELF. 
 
 MANCHESTER : JOHN HEYWOOD, 141 & 143, DEANSGATE. 
 LONDON: SIMPKIN, MARSHALL, AND Co. 
 
 AND ALT. BOOKSELLERS,
 
 THIS COLLECTION 
 
 OF 
 
 ME. BEIGHT'S SPEECHES 
 
 ON- 
 PARLIAMENTARY REFORM, 
 
 DELIVERED BY HIM IN THE PRINCIPAL CITIES IK 
 
 THE UNITED KINGDOM, DURING THE AUTUMN OF 1866, 
 
 I 
 IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED TO 
 
 THOMAS BAYLEY POTTER, ESQ., 
 
 THE REPRESENTATIVE IN PARLIAMENT OF MR. BRIGHT'S NATIVE 
 BOROUGH OF ROCHDALE, AND A SINCERE FRIEND 
 OF THE PEOPLE, 
 
 BY THE EDITOR.
 
 SPEECH AT BIRMINGHAM. 
 
 ON the occasion of the great Reform Demonstration at Birmingham, 
 which was held on Monday, the 27th August, Mr. Bright delivered 
 the following speech in the large room of the Town Hall, to a 
 crowded and enthusiastic audience. After the extraordinary 
 cheering which greeted his rising had subsided, the hon. gentleman 
 said : 
 
 Mr. May or and gentlemen, I accept the address which has just been 
 presented to me with feelings which I shall not attempt to express. 
 I accept it as ample compensation for whatsoever labours I have expended 
 in your service, and I shall take it from this meeting, and hold it as a 
 constant stimulus to whatsoever labours may lie in my path in your 
 service for the future. There are times when I feel no little despondency at 
 the small result of many years of public lahour ; but to look upon a 
 meeting like that assembled here, and to look upon that vast gathering 
 which your town lias exhibited to the country and to the world to-day, is 
 enough to dispel every feeling of fear or of despondency, and to fill the 
 heart and nerve the arm to new and greater labours for the future. During 
 the last session of Parliament, in the debate on the second reading of the 
 Franchise Bill, I took the opportunity of offering a word of counsel and of 
 warning to tlie powerful party in the House which opposed that bill. In 
 those words of warning and of counsel I asked them to remember 
 that if they should succeed in defeating that bill and overthrowing the 
 Government, there would still remain the people of England to be met, and 
 the claims of the great question of reform to be considered and settled. We 
 have not had to wait long before that which I foretold has come to pass. 
 In London we have seen assemblies of the people such as for a generation 
 past have not been witnessed. In many other parts of the country there have 
 been meetings greater than have been seen for thirty years, and notably 
 to-day there has been a voice given forth from the very centre and heartfof 
 England which will reach at least to the circumference of the three king- 
 doms. There has been an attempt to measure the numbers that are present 
 in this hall at this moment. There are probably six thousand persons here. 
 I ask any who were present to-day to reckon how many times this hall 
 could have been filled from that multitudinous congregation upon which our
 
 2 
 
 yes rested, but to the full extent of which they could scarcely reach. It is 
 highly probable that it might have been filled forty times from that vast 
 number. Yes, and at this moment I am told that outside there is an 
 audience far greater than that I now address ; whilst to-morrow morning 
 there will be millions of an audience throughout the whole of the United 
 Kingdom, anxious to know what has been done and what has been said on 
 this 27th day of August iu this great town of Birmingham. We are not here 
 to-night to discuss the question of reform, because that is a question which 
 we have already settled. What we have to do is to discuss calmly our 
 present position and our future work in reference to this great question. My 
 honourable colleague has said that the bill of the late Government was one 
 of singular moderation. It was also a bill I speak now only of the Fran- 
 chise Bill of a singular and most honest simplicity ; and that was the great 
 reason that I felt it my duty, and that you felt it yours, to give it an honest 
 support. I will just tell you how much and how little it proposed to give, 
 or would have given, to the working classes of this country ; and I think it 
 necessary to state this because of the argument which I intend to raise upon 
 it. The Government produced to the House of Commons a blue book, most 
 elaborately compiled, and as far as I know, with the exception of one point, 
 correct and trustworthy ; but they proposed to inform the House of the 
 number of working men who are now upon the register, and what addition 
 would be made to that number if the bill passed. I differed entirely from 
 their estimate, which I believe to have been to a very great extent erroneous, 
 and I think I produced facts in the House of Commons which sustained my 
 opinion. Mr. Gladstone told us that at present there are on the borough 
 registers in England and Wales working men to the number of 126,000. He 
 showed further that by the abolition of the ratepaying clauses, if there was 
 no alteration in the 10 suffrage, there would be an addition of 60,000 
 electors, who, he reckoned, would all be working men ; and then he said 
 that if the franchise was reduced from 10 to 7, there would be a further 
 . addition of 144, 000, all of whom he estimated as working men . Therefore 
 ' he stated that when that bill passed there would be on the borough registers 
 of England and Wales 330,000 working men, of whom 204,000 would 
 be new voters added by that bill. I believe that estimate was made with 
 perfect honesty by Mr. Gladstone, but that it was to a very large extent 
 erroneous. I showed several boroughs, and I believe I might have gone 
 through almost every borough in the United Kingdom, where the 
 number of working men stated in the returns was at least double, 
 and in many cases far more than double, the actual number 
 upon the register. I estimated, also, that although the abolition 
 of the ratepaying clauses might add 60,000 new votes, it would 
 l>e very unfair to expect that more than one-third, or 20,000 
 of them being ten pounders and upwards would be of the class of working 
 men. 1 said further that it was absurd to reckon that every man between 
 10 and 7 was of the class of working men, and I supposed that at least no 
 more than two-thirds of them could be placed in that list. My estimate 
 differed, therefore, from Mr. Gladstone's thus far. I said that of the 126,000 
 now upon the register there were not more than the half, or 63,000; instead
 
 of there being 60,000 admitted by the abolition of the ratepaying clause, 
 there would not be more than 20,000; and that, instead of there being 144,000 
 working men admitted by the reduction of the franchise from 10 to 7, it 
 was a fair estimate to take two-thirds of that number, or 96,000. My 
 opinion therefore, was, that when that bill passed, if it should pass, there 
 would be upon the borough registers of England and Wales, not 330,000 of 
 working men, but 179,000, and that the bill would not admit 204,000 but 
 only 1 16,000 of that class. Take either my estimate of 116,000 or Mr. Glad- 
 stone's estimate of 204,000 as the number of working men to be added by 
 the late bill to the register, and I will ask you what, after all, does it all 
 come to? 204,000 working men according to the Government estimate, 
 116,000 according to mine, and in addition about 200,000 new voters added 
 to the counties under a 14 franchise, who must of necessity be almost 
 altogether outside the working classes. That was the bill which my honour- 
 able colleague has described as one of singular moderation. Out of five or 
 six millions of men in the United Kingdom who are not now enfranchised, 
 the whole number of the working classes to be admitted in the boroughs of 
 England and "Wales was only 200,000. Now that bill, so moderate that I 
 confess I had entertained the hope that it would pass through Parliament 
 without any great difficulty, was resisted as if it had been charged with all 
 the dangerous matter which the Tory party actually attributed to it. It 
 was intrigued against in a manner I had almost said more base, but I will 
 say more hateful than any measure I have seen opposed during the 23 yeara 
 that I have sat in the House of Commons; and, finally, under every kind of 
 false pretence, it was rejected by a small majority, and fell, and with it the 
 Government which had proposed it also fell. The reason I have given you 
 these figures is that I want to show you the desperate resolution of the 
 present Government, and of the party which it represents, to deny to the 
 working classes of this country any share in its government. I am not 
 confined to the votes of the House and the destruction of the bill, but I am 
 able, I think, to show you by the arguments upon which the Tory party pro- 
 ceeded that such is their determination, and it may be their unchangeable 
 resolution. Several of the speakers to-night have referred to the slanders 
 and calumnies heaped upon the great body of the people during the dis- 
 cussions of the last session; and, no doubt, although his name was not 
 mentioned, the speakers had in their minds one member of the House 
 who virtually has no constituency whose sole constituent, at any 
 rate at that time, is now no longer here to partake of the strife 
 or the contests of politics, though I presume another constituent acts 
 and reigns in his stead. If I quote anything that Mr. Lowe said, 
 understand me that I wish to bring no charge against him whatsoever. 
 He has spent some years in Australia, and probably has voyaged round the 
 world ; and I do not deny him the right to voyage round the world of 
 politics and to cast anchor in any port that may be pleasant to him. I 
 merely intend to quote something that he said, because when it was said it 
 was received with rapturous enthusiasm by the great party in the House 
 who are the supporters of Lord Derby and of Mr. Disraeli. This is extracted 
 from the Times newspaper, a paper in which, as is well known, the speaker
 
 has been for many years an eminent writer, and over which, unless reports 
 speak untruly, he has no small degree of control. He says : " I have had 
 opportunities of knowing some of the constituencies of this country ; and I 
 ask if you want venality, ignorance, drunkenness, and the means of intimi- 
 dating if you want impulsive, unreflecting, violent people where would 
 you go to look for them ? To the top or to the bottom ? It is ridiculous to 
 blink the fact that since the Reform Act the great corruption has been among 
 the voters between 20 and 10 rental the lodging-house and beerhouse 
 keepers ;" ' but it is said, Only give the franchise to the artisan and then 
 see the difference." He goes on passing a sentence which was a classical 
 illustration which amused the House, but which it is not necessary to quote 
 here. He said : " You know what sort of persons live in these small 
 houses" houses, of course, between 10 and 7. " We have long had ex- 
 perience of them under the name of freemen, and it would be a good thing if 
 they were disfranchised altogether. They were dying out of themselves, 
 but the Government propose to bring them back again under another name, 
 so that the effect of passing this bill would be, first, to increase corruption, 
 intimidation, and all the evils that happen usually in elections ; and next 
 that the working men of England, finding themselves in a full majority of 
 the whole constituency, will awake to a full sense of their power, and say, 
 ' We can do better for ourselves. Don't let us any longer be cajoled at 
 elections. Let us set up shop for ourselves. We have objects to carry as 
 well as our neighbours, and let us unite to carry those objects. We have the 
 machinery. We have our trades unions. We have our leaders ready. (Loud 
 Opposition cheers, and laughter. ) We have the power of combination as we 
 have shown over and over again, and when we have a prize to fight for we 
 will bring it to bear with tenfold more force than ever before.' " These are 
 the sentiments which, uttered in my hearing, were received with enthusias- 
 tic approbation by the great body of the Tory party and by the supporters 
 of the present Government. Observe what it really means. It is that voters 
 now between '20 rental and 10 are so bad that if you go lower it will be 
 something like ruin. That there will be more venality, ignorance, and 
 drunkenness ; and then, speaking to the House of Commons in which the 
 landed proprietors, or the bulk of them, have always acted as a general trades' 
 union, where they raised the price of bread and diminished the size of the loaf as 
 long as the people would let them he says there will be combinations of work- 
 ing men for their special objects, and therefore mind, this is his conclusion 
 shut them out for ever; bolt the door, say, loudly and boldly, you, the 
 Parliament of England, to the 5,000,000 or 6,000,000 of men who have now 
 no vote, and whom we pretend to represent, "No one of you who cannot 
 pay a rental of 10 shall ever speak by his direct representative within the 
 walls of this House. " That is the policy which Mr. Lowe recommends. It 
 is not important at all because Mr. Lowe recommends it. It is important 
 only because it has been accepted and approved by the great Tory party in 
 Parliament. However, I say I who am charged with designs against the 
 safety of the institutions of this country I say it is a dangerous policy a 
 policy which in other countries where carried out has done great things. 
 Through it crowns and coronets have sometimes been lost, and I am not
 
 sure that it is a policy which can be safely maintained with us. I asked 
 one of the most trusted and intelligent and excellent Frenchmen with 
 whom I am acquainted, one of the most confidential friends of the dynasty 
 of Louis Phillippe and of the Orleans family, what it was that drove that 
 family from France, and I referred to stories of corruption amongst minis- 
 ters and other things which had been circulated in public and in private. 
 He said : " None of these things did it. It was the attempt of the King 
 to govern France by a parliament that represented an insignificant minority of 
 the people, and which parliament he thought he could perpetually manage 
 by a judicious distribution of patronage." On the principle of governing 
 this country by a Parliament elected by an insignificant minority of the 
 people, Lord Derby comes into office, and judging from the speeches and 
 the votes of the last session of Parliament, his party intends as long as 
 possible to govern upon that principle and that policy. Working men in 
 this hall, I wish my voice had been loud enough to have said what I am 
 about to say to the vast multitude which we looked on this day ; but I say 
 it to them through the press, and to all the working men of this kingdom, 
 I say that the accession to office of Lord Derby is a declaration of war 
 against the working classes. (Cheers, and a voice from the platform, 
 "We accept the challenge.") The course taken in London the other day 
 by the police, and it had almost been by the military, is an illustration of 
 the doctrines and the principles of the Derby administration. They reckon 
 nothing of the constitution of their country a constitution which has no 
 more regard to the crown or to the aristocracy than it has to the people a 
 constitution which regards the House of Commons fairly representing all 
 the nation, as important a part of the governmental system of this king- 
 dom as either the House of Lords or the throne itself. If they thus despise 
 the constitution they like wise despise the claims of five millions or six millions 
 who are unrepresented. You may work, you may pay taxes, you may serve 
 in the army, and fight ; 70, 000 or more of your brethren are now living under 
 the burning sun of India, and twice as many more are serving in the ranks 
 in different parts of the world ; and you, the great body of the people from 
 whom these men are drawn, are not considered worthy to do so simple an 
 act as to give a vote in your great town for your present or any future mem- 
 bers. You are to have no vote, no share in the Government ; the country 
 you live in is not to be your country. You are like the Coolies or the 
 Chinese who are imported into the West Indies or California. You are to 
 work, but you are not to take root in the country, or to considerjthe country 
 ns your country, and, worse than all this, in addition to this refusal of the 
 commonest right of the constitution, you are insulted by the cheers which a 
 great party have given to the language which 1 have read to you to-night. 
 You are to be told that you are so ignorant and so venal, so drunken, so 
 impulsive, so unreflecting, and so disorderly that it is not even safe to skim 
 off as it were the very cream of you to the number of 116,000, or it may be 
 of 204,000, and to admit them to a vote for members of the House of Com- 
 mons. This is the Tory theory. This is the faith of Lord Derby and his 
 party, and I maintain that I am not saying a word that is an exaggeration 
 of the truth, for 1 have heard that party over and over again vociferously
 
 6 
 
 cheer sentiments such as I have described. The Government which has been 
 overturned was a very different Government. Lord Russell had no fear of 
 freedom. He could much more easily be persuaded to give up, and he would 
 much more willingly abandon for ever the name of Russell than he would give 
 up, his hereditary love of freedom. The Government, which was led by Earl 
 Russell in one House and by Mr. Gladstone in the other, was founded and acted 
 upon the principle of trust and confidence in the people. Some said there 
 was not much difference between the Derby Government and the Russell 
 Government. Lord Derby asked Lord Clarendon to take office in his 
 Government. There was something charming in the very audacity of the 
 effrontery of Lord Derby. Lord Clarendon was an eminent minister of the 
 Government that brought in a bill which the Tory party declared to be sub- 
 versive of the constitution ; and Lord Derby asks Lord Clarendon to keep 
 the Foreign-office in the new Government ! The Government of Lord Derby 
 in the House of Commons sitting all in a row reminds me very much of a 
 number of amusing and ingenious gentlemen whom I daresay some of you 
 have seen and listened to. I mean the Christy Minstrels. The Christy 
 Minstrels, if I am not misinformed, are, when they are clean washed, white 
 men ; but they come before the audience as black as the blackest negroes, 
 and by this transformation it is expected that their jokes and songs will be 
 more amusing. The Derby minstrels pretend to be Liberal and white ; but 
 the fact is if you come nearer and examine them closely you will find 
 them to be just as black and curly as the Tories have ever been. I do 
 not know, and I will not pretend to say, which of them it is that plays 
 the banjo and which the bones. But I have no doubt that, in 
 their manoeuvres to keep in office during the coming session, we 
 shall know something more about them than we do at present; 
 they are, in point of fact, when they pretend to be Liberal, mere 
 usurpers and impostors. Their party will not allow them to be liberal, and 
 the party exists only upon the principle upon which they have acted in all 
 their past history of resisting and rejecting every proposition of a liberal 
 character that has been submitted to them. "What is this Derby principle 
 of shutting out more than five-sixths of all the people from the exercise of 
 constitutional rights ? If any of you take ship to Canada you will find the 
 Derby principle utterly repudiated. But in Canada there is no uprooting 
 of institutions, and no destruction of property, and there is no absence of 
 order or of loyalty. If you go to Australia you will find there that the 
 Derby principle is unknown, and yet there reigns order as in this country, 
 contentment with the institutions of the colonies, and a regard for law and 
 property. If you go to those greatest and most glorious colonies of this 
 country, the United States of America, there you find a people exhibiting 
 all the virtues which belong to the greatest nations on the face of the earth ; 
 there you find a people passing through a tremendous war and a tremendous 
 revolution with a conduct and success, with a generosity and a magnanimity 
 which have attracted and aroused the admiration of the world; and if you 
 go to Europe you find in the republic of Switzerland, in the kingdoms 
 of Holland and Belgium, in Norway and Sweden, in France, and now you 
 are about to witness it in Germany, a wide extension of the franchise, hitherto,
 
 in this country, in our time, unknown; and neither emperor, king, nor noble 
 believes that his authority or his interests, or the greatness or happiness of 
 any one of those countries will be jeopardised by the free admission of the 
 people to constitutional rights. In Germany, the vote is to be given to 
 every man of 25 years of age and upwards. Let them propose to da the 
 same here, and then we shall not be in advance of the great State of North 
 Germany which is now being established. But what is it we are coming to 
 in this country ? Why, that that which is being rapidly accepted in almost 
 all parts of the world is being persistently and obstinately refused here in 
 England, the home of freedom, the mother of parliaments. Yet in this 
 England five millions of grown men, representing more than 20, 000, 000 of 
 our population, are to be permanently denied that which makes the only 
 difference between despotism and freedom all the world over. I venture to 
 say that this cannot last very long. How do we stand at this moment ? 
 The noble and illustrious lady who sits upon the throne she whose gentle 
 hand wields the sceptre over that wide empire of which we are the heart 
 and centre she was not afraid of the Franchise Bill which the Government 
 introduced last session. Seven times, I think, by her own lips or by her 
 pen, she has recommended to Parliament the admission of a large number of 
 working men to the Parliamentary franchise. If this proposition was 
 destructive, would not the Queen discover that fact ? If the bill of the last 
 session had been a pernicious bill, would the 30,000,000 of people of the 
 United Kingdom not have been able to produce one single public meeting 
 in condemnation of it ? The middle class in our towns are by a vast majority 
 in favour of it. All the middle class of Birmingham have sympathised with 
 the great proceedings of this day, and I doubt not that by-and-bye we shall 
 see in the populous districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire assemblies rivalling 
 those which have been held in London and Birmingham, and if we go to the 
 House of Commons that House elected so much by landlord compulsion in 
 the counties, and by corruption, intimidation, and tumult in the boroughs do 
 not suppose that I am charging that House of Commons with faults that it 
 does not itself understand and acknowledge : have you read the report of 
 the proceedings at the commission for Yarmouth ? Did you read that a late 
 member for that borough is said to have spent 70,000 to maintain his seat ? 
 Did you read that one gentleman, an inferior partner in a brewery, con- 
 tributed 4, 000 for the election of his partner, and that another gentleman, 
 knowing nothing of that borough goes down there and supplies 6,000 to 
 fight a contest spread then only orer a few days? and remember that when 
 Yarmoiith or any other borough is thus brought before the public it is only 
 a sample of a very considerable sack and that for every borough which is 
 thus exposed there are probably 10 or 20 other boroughs which are to a very 
 large extent in the very same condemnation. Notwithstanding this, if 
 we go to the House of Commons, we find the Parliament of England 
 at this moment about equally divided, and that half the House was 
 in favour of the late bill. If that be so, what is wanted in this poising 
 and balancing of the scale? It only wants this, that the working 
 men of England should heartily throw their influence into that side which, 
 is for their interests, and that side will prevail. You know I have preferred
 
 8 
 
 that the franchise should be established upon what I consider to be the 
 ancient practice of the country. I am not afraid of the principles of the 
 Reform League. I have no fear of manhood sufferage , and no man is more 
 a friend of the ballot than T am. It is a great cause which is offered to your 
 notice to-night. It is a grand and noble Hag under which you are asked to 
 enlist yourselves. What I would recommend you to do is this and I 
 imagine myself at this moment to be speaking in the ear of every intelligent, 
 sober, and thoughtful working man in the three kingdoms let us try to 
 move on together ; let us not split hairs on this question ; let us do as your 
 fathers did thirty-four years ago ; let us have associations everywhere ; let 
 every workshop and factory be a reform association ; let there be in every 
 one of them a correspondent, or a secretary who shall enrol members and 
 assist this great and noble cause. I would recommend that the passages I 
 have read from that celebrated and unhappy speech should be printed upon 
 cards, and should be hung up in every room in every factory, workshop, 
 and clubhouse, and in every place where working men are accustomed to 
 assemble. Let us rouse the spirit of the people against these slanderers of 
 a great and noble nation. There will come soon another election. The 
 working men may not be able to vote, but they can form themselves into a 
 powerful body, and they can throw their influence in every borough on the 
 side of the candidates who pledge themselves to the question of reform. If 
 they do this, you may depend upon it they will change many seats, and 
 give a certain majority for reform in the next Parliament. It may be 
 necessary and desirable to meet Parliament again with petitions from all 
 parts of the country, signed by numberless names. There is no effort which 
 the constitution, which morality permits us to use, that we should leave 
 unused and unmade for the purpose of furthering this great cause ; and let 
 us be sure of this, that we demand only that the question of reform shall 
 be dealt with by a Government honestly in favour of reform. The address 
 which has been presented to me has referred to 1832. I remember that time 
 welL My young heart then was stirred with the trumpet blast that sounded 
 from your midst. There was no part of this kingdom where your voice was 
 not heard. Let it sound again. Stretch out your hands to your country- 
 men in every part of the three kingdoms, and ask them to join you in a great 
 and righteoiis effort on behalf of that freedom which has been so long the 
 boast of Englishmen, but which the majority of Englishmen have never yet 
 possessed. I shall esteem it an honour which my words cannot describe, 
 and which even in thought I cannot measure, if the population which I am 
 permitted to represent should do its full duty in the great struggle which is 
 before us. Eemember the great object for which we strive. Care not for 
 calumnies and lies. Our object is this to restore the British constitution 
 all its fulness, with all its freedom, to the British people.
 
 ON the 24th of September, in the Free- trade Hall, Manchester, 
 which was crowded almost to suffocation by upwards of 5,000 
 persons, Mr. Bright was presented with an Address by the Reform 
 League recently established in that city. In accepting it, Mr. 
 Bright spoke as follows : 
 
 I was not aware when I was invited to attend this meeting that anything 
 different from the ordinary course of proceedings would take place. I was 
 not informed that I should be honoured by the presentation of any address. 
 I accept this address with many thanks for the kindness which you have 
 shown me ; at the same time I accept it with something like fear and 
 trembling, because of the mighty responsibility which by this address you 
 would throw upon me. I have never had any ambition for leadership ; I 
 do not feel myself to have fitness for such an office. I have worked hitherto 
 wheresoever I chanced to be, whether in the ranks or in the front ; and 
 without pledging myself to undertake all that this address asks of me to 
 undertake, and perform, I may, however, freely pledge myself to 
 this, that wherever I find men willing to work for human freedom and human 
 happiness, I trust I shall be ready to take my part with them. And 
 now, as my eye has rested upon this wonderful assembly, I have 
 thought it not wrong to ask myself whether there is any question that 
 is great, that is sufficient, that is noble, that has called us together to-night, 
 and I have come to the conclusion that great as is this meeting, and 
 transcendaiitly great the meeting which was held in the middle of the day, 
 that the question which has brought us together is worthy of our assembly 
 aad worthy of every effort we can make. We are met for the purpose, so far 
 as lies in our power, of widening the boundaries and making more stable the 
 foundations of the freedom of the country in which we live. We are not as 
 our fathers were 200 years ago, called upon to do battle with the Crown; we 
 have no dynasty to complain of, no royal family to dispossess. In our day 
 the wearer of the crown of England is in favour of freedom. For on many 
 separate occasions, as you all know, the Queen has strongly, as strongly as 
 became her station, urged upon Parliament the extension of the franchise 
 of the people. Parliament has been less liberal than the Crown, and time 
 after time these recommendations have been disregarded, and the offers of 
 the monarch have been rejected and denied. But no more of that now; and 
 it is not our business to-night to assail the hereditary branch of the legis- 
 lature the House of Peers. For my share, I cannot but think that if there 
 are dangers ahead for the House of Lords they are dangers not so much from 
 without as from within. Its foes in my view are those of its own household. 
 It stands in the high place of a senate, but it too much abdicates the duties 
 of a senate ; it gives its votes, its power, its proxies into the hands of one
 
 10 
 
 man, and he often, and as at present, is not by any means the wisest of men. 
 Unfortunately for that House it does almost nothing; it does not even 
 debate freely, and the session will pass and you scarcely hear any discussion 
 in that House which is calculated to instruct the people on political subjects. 
 I sometimes fear that it is no longer a temple of honour, the path to which 
 leads through the temple of virtue . It has become too much the refuge for 
 worn-out members of the House of Commons; it becomes every year more 
 numerous, without, I fear, becoming more useful, and unless it can wake 
 itself up to the great duties of a senate, decay and darkness will settle upon 
 it. Some of its members may read what I say. I beg to assure them that 
 in these few observations I am speaking in no unfriendly spirit of the House 
 of Lords. But we have a distinct purpose to-night, and our purpose is this, 
 to restore the representation of the people, to make the House of Commons, 
 the House which professes to represent the common people, a reality and no 
 longer a sham. Now, the facts of our representation are simple, the im- 
 portant facts can be stated in about two sentences. I think at every reform 
 meeting they should be restated, and they should fix themselves in the mind 
 of every reformer throughout the country. I am charged with telling 
 things that everybody knows; well, if we tell them often enough everybody 
 will know. This is a fact, and it is worth mentioning, that there are seven 
 millions of grown-up men responsible to the laws in the United Kingdom of 
 Great Britain and Ireland; that of these about one million and a quarter are 
 on the list of voters; that exclusive of paupers and exclusive of criminals 
 though I am sorry to mention these two classes in the same sentence ex- 
 clusive of these, to whom no man proposes to give the franchise, there are 
 five millions of men in the United Kingdom who have no votes. Of the 
 million and a quarter who have votes the counties take up about 750,000, 
 and the boroughs about 550,000. Xow, 1 shall say that which some men 
 will contradict, but which I venture to say is true, when I declare that for 
 the most part the county representation in this country is not a popular 
 representation in any honest sense of that term. We know that with a 
 franchise of 50 occupation and the freehold franchise added to it, that 
 the great body of the people in every county is excluded from the 
 elective (franchise. Well, I regard the county representation to a very large 
 extent as a dead body tied to the living body of our borough representation. 
 I believe it will become less so. In. Ireland there are some free counties ; in 
 Scotland there are some, and there will be more. But still, taking the 
 county representation as a whole, it is in a most unsatisfactory condition. 
 Well, but, of the boroughs where there is life and where there is some 
 freedom, what is their condition ? Only one fact. There are 145 boroughs 
 with over 20,000 inhabitants each, and they return 215 members ; there are 
 109 boroughs with over 20,000 of population, and they return 181 members. 
 But look at the difference in the number of voters, the number of the popu- 
 lation, and the amount of taxation. It is something startling and enormous. 
 The boroughs under 20,000 have 79,000 electors ; the boroughs over 20,000 
 have 485,000 electors. The boroughs under 20,000 have 1,350,000 people ; 
 the boroughs over 20,000 have 9,305,000 people. The boroughs under 
 20,000 pay 367,000 in taxation ; the boroughs over 20,000 pay 5,240,000
 
 11 
 
 in taxation ; and yet the boroughs under 20,000 have 215 members, as 
 against 181 members for boroughs over 20,000. Now, I am sure you will 
 agree with me in this, that the representation which, as regards the fran- 
 chise, shuts out five millions of men, and which, as regards distribution, 
 leaves the state of things which I have now described, can only be fairly 
 pictured when 1 call it a stupendous fraud upon the people. The counties 
 I have Lord Derby's own authority for it the counties are politically th 
 hunting ground of the great landowners. Lord Derby said, "if you will 
 tell me the politics of a few of the chief landowners in the county I will tell 
 you the politics of the county members. " The boroughs, what are they? 
 Manchester knows no bribery, nor does Birmingham ; but of the boroughs 
 of 20,000 population and under, how many of them are full of corruption ? 
 There are small boroughs, such as Banbury, Tavistock, and Liskeard, where, 
 I believe, great honour and purity prevail ; but the bulk of these boroughs 
 are accessible to the influence of any man who will come there with plenty 
 of money in his pocket, and no principles or morals in his heart. In point 
 of fact, without any exaggeraion, we may say that all the evils which are 
 possible to influence an electoral system are amply provided for by the 
 electoral laws of England. Compulsion, bribery, drunkenness, lavish and 
 disgraceful expenditure, all these not only exist but are absolutely inevitable 
 under the state of the law which now prevails ; and I venture to say and 
 I never said anything in my lif e which I would more easily undertake to 
 prove that there is no remedy for this state of things where ambitious and 
 unprincipled and rich men come into contact with small numbers of voters ; 
 there is no remedy whatsoever but in large constituencies and the security 
 of the ballot. Now if I have fairly described the state of things, can we 
 wonder at the difficulty which meets us when we have any question before 
 Parliament ? Look back at the question of the corn laws, look back on the 
 question of the paper duty, look back or look now on the question of our 
 disgraceful expenditure, and you will find that on every occasion when the 
 people ask for any reform of any kind, they have to make a desperate 
 fight for it, just as though they were wresting it not from their country- 
 men and brothers, but from the representatives of a conquering nation. 
 Take this last session of all this session which has just passed over, a 
 session ever to be remembered. The Government, headed by Lord Russell 
 in the House of Lords, by Mr. Gladstone in the House of Commons anxious 
 to make one step forward in the direction of popular rights, brought in a 
 bill most honest in its character, and most moderate in its dimensions. It 
 was a bill so moderate in its dimensions, that some of us who think much 
 more would be greater wisdom to grant, found ourselves in some difficulty 
 in tendering to the Government our cordial support to enable them to carry 
 that bill. Well, that bill, which I hold every man who is in favour of any 
 reform at all had no kind of excuse for opposing that bill was met by an 
 opposition, I will say at once as malignant and as dishonest as I have 
 ever seen given to any measure in the House of Commons. There was no- 
 artifice, there was no trick that was too mean and too base to be made use of 
 to retard the progress of and ultimately destroy the bill, and to such an 
 extent did it go that even Lord Stanley was induced, I know not how, I
 
 know not by what evil spiiit of his part}' he was iiuluctfl to make a 
 proposition which to my certain knowledge some among his own party 
 described as utterly disgraceful. The facts and the arguments on which 
 that bill was supported and defended were not met, and never could be met. 
 Another policy was adopted, and to get rid of the inconvenient argument of 
 figures, they turned round and did not hesitate to slander a whole nation. 
 The name of a gentleman eminent in these matters has already been men- 
 tioned. If I mention his name, or if I quote what he said, understand that 
 I make no charge against him that he holds opinions which I so much 
 deplore. Any man may hold what opinions he likes, and the opinions of 
 any particular man in Parliament are not of very great importance. But 
 these opinions were important because they were addressed to 300 mem- 
 bers of the party which is now in power, and by that party they were 
 received with uproarious and universal enthusiasm. I do not think that 
 any meeting of the working classes held during this recess should pass with- 
 out some reference to the observations of that gentleman. Bear in mind 
 that not only were they received with enthusiastic cheering by the Tory 
 party, but when the Queen sent for Lord Derby and committed to him the 
 charge of forming a new Government, he either directly, or through his 
 patron, the owner of the borough of Calne, endeavoured, as is universally 
 believed, and as I believe, t prevail upon the man who had uttered these 
 sentiments to become a member of his Government. These are some of his 
 sentiments: "I havehad opportunities of knowin g some of the constituencies 
 in this country, and, I ask if you want venality, ignorance, drunkenness, 
 and the means of intimidation ; if you want impulsive, unreflecting, violent 
 people, where would you go to look for them to the top or the bottom ? It 
 is ridiculous to blink the fact that since the Reform Act the great 
 corruption has been among the voters between the 20 and 10 rental the 
 A'10 lodging-house and beerhouse keepers. But it is said, ' Only give the fran- 
 chise to the artisan, and then see the difference.' " He goes on immediately 
 after, omitting a sentence which is nothing to the argument. "We know 
 what sort of people live in these small houses. We have long had experi- 
 ence of them under the name of ' freemen, ' and it would be a good thing 
 if they were disfranchised altogether. They were dying out of themselves, 
 but the Government proposed to bring them back again under another 
 name." That refers of course to persons who live in houses between 7 and 
 10 rental. Then he said if this bill should pass what dreadful things would 
 happen. " The first stage would be in increase of corruption, intimidation, 
 and disorder, of all the evils that happen usually in elections. What would 
 be the second ? The second will be, that the working men of England, 
 finding themselves in a full majority of the whole constituency, will awake 
 to a full sense of their power. They will say, we can do better for our- 
 selves ; we have objects to carry as well as our neighbours, and let us unite 
 to carry those objects ; we have machinery, we have our trades' unions, we 
 have our leaders all ready. We have the power of combination, as we have 
 shown over and over again ; and when we have a prize to fight for we will 
 bring to bear with tenfold more force than ever before. " Perhaps the hint 
 that you have your trades' unions, and machinery, and leaders a hint which
 
 1 offered to you some years ago may have some effect, coming from suck 
 lips. But you see the whole tenor of these observations is this. There are 
 men to whom 1 should attribute no blame for uttering them, or for holding 
 them, for there are men so timid as to see giants and ghosts everywhere. 
 The whole tenor of these observations is to show that the great body of the 
 working classes because, mind, this bill only as explained by Mr. Glad- 
 stone, and in my opinion it was an exaggerated estimate, proposed to admit 
 200,000 of them these observations are based on the opinion that the whole 
 of the great body of the working classes are in that condition of ignorance 
 and degradation and also of hostility to the existing institutions of the 
 country, that it would not be safe to admit to the franchise even two hun- 
 dred thousand out of the five millions who are now excluded. Now, I said 
 at Birmingham, and I say here, that in every workshop, in every room, and 
 in every factory, in every clubhouse of every trade, there ought to be a card 
 hung up with these remarks, these slanders of the working men, there 
 suspended. If these statements be true, hang the card up there that you 
 may see in that mirror what you are, and reform yourselves. If this charge 
 be false, as J hold it to be false, then read what it is that is said of you by 
 those who are hostile to your political rights, and draw your ranks closer 
 together and make a more resolute and determined effort to change the state 
 of things in this country. Some newspapers have said, since my speech at 
 Binningham was delivered, that it was unfair to try to place this on the 
 back of the Tory party. Why did they cheer it ? Why have their news- 
 papers said that here is a great man, dropped down as it were from the 
 clouds, to tell iis all about the constitution of this country ? Why is it that 
 Lord Derby spent many efforts trying to pursuade the utterer of these senti- 
 ments to become a member, and a powerful member of his Cabinet ? I say the 
 doctrines which Jl r. Lowe uttered in that speech, I say they are in the main the 
 doctrines upon which the Tory party has acted for generations back, 
 although there arc not many men in the House probably of that party who 
 would dare to say what he said, and I suspect there is hardly one of them 
 who could say it so well. I want to ask you a question. I do not know 
 how many thousand persons there are here, but if I were to say 6,000 or 7, 000 
 and I do not know how many thousands have been joining your de- 
 monstration to-day in Manchester; but I will put the question to them 
 through the gentlemen below (the reporters), to whom we give so much 
 trouble, and to whom we are so much indebted. I put this question. If 
 these arguments of ignorance and drunkenness be true, what does it show? 
 There is a paper piiblished in London the Morning Herald which the 
 other day 1 am told wrote some hints for me for my speech on this occasion. 
 The Morning Herald, which is an organ of the Tory party, pointed out 
 a fact, which I stated with great amplitude at a meeting of Rochdale Sunday 
 School teachers I think on Good Friday last that a very large portion of 
 the children of the working classes in Manchester a proportion deplorably 
 large was growing up without any actual provision being made for their 
 education. And the Morning Herald states also that in Manchester there 
 is a great deal of drunkenness, although I believe all the figures show that 
 there is less (b unkenness in Manchester, probably, than in any other town
 
 of equal magnitude in the kingdom. I will assume the ignorance for the 
 moment, and assume the drunkenness, and assume the degradation to be 
 there, and what shall I say of the Government that has permitted it ? 
 "What is this Government what is this supreme power in this country? It 
 holds all the land, or nearly so; it holds the revenues of the richest church 
 the world has ever seen. It has both Houses of Parliament to do its 
 bidding. It has two national and noble universities; in fact, it has every- 
 thing of power in this country, and yet according to the showing of this 
 writer the people are ignorant and drunken and degraded. It must be far 
 worse than that of almost any other country, because in almost every other 
 constitutional country the franchise is far more widely extended than it is in 
 this, and without the slightest danger to property or to order. "Why is it, I 
 ask you, that Englishmen in England are not so well educated as Englishmen 
 in New England ? In the New England States of North America there have 
 been seven generations of men who came originally from this country, who 
 have been thoroughly and fully instructed. I know that in every Free State 
 I mean in every State that was free before the late war there is a wide 
 suffrage; there schools are universal, and all the people have the 
 fullest opportunity of being thoroughly instructed for the purposes 
 of life. In this country, what are we doing ? The people who have 
 this matter in their hands, and who could settle it, are discussing questions 
 of catechisms Thirty -nine Articles what they call " conscience-clauses." 
 They are all engaged in worrying some dry bone of this kind, whilst the 
 great body of the people, and especially the poorest of the people, are left 
 wholly unprovided for. I venture to say and I would stake everything I 
 have in the world upon it that if the platform of the National Keform 
 League, or any platform which gave a substantial and real representation to 
 the whole people, was embodied in an act of Parliament there would not 
 pass over three sessions of Parliament before there would be a full provision 
 for the thorough instruction of every working man's child in this kingdom. 
 But there is another argument that was very often used in the House of 
 Commons; which is even more extraordinary, coming from the quarter 
 whence we heard it ; and it was this that the country is so prosperous, 
 proving that it is so well governed that in reality there is not only no occa- 
 sion for anything more, but nobody has any right to ask for anything more. 
 It was one of the arguments, I believe, of the gentleman from whom I have 
 quoted, that we have a right to be well governed, but that the right to 
 govern is a right which exists and rests much higher up. We are assembled 
 here in a building which recalls a good many memories if one had the time 
 and I had the voice to dwell upon them. But, may I ask you why it is we 
 are prosperous ? You recollect, many of you here, twenty-five years ago 
 in the year 1841 this county was like a county subjected to desolation and 
 to famine; and, in fact, it is only since 1846, since the abolition of the corn 
 laws, since the general change to the free trade policy, that there has been 
 continually growing that prosperity which is now brought against us as an 
 argument why there should be no further reform in Parliament. Suppose 
 we had the corn laws now, with the August we have had and the September 
 we are having, gold would be going out of the country, the rate of interest
 
 would be rising, the wages of the people would be falling, the wages they 
 received would be absorbed in the purchase of dear food ; and generally 
 over the whole country there would come a state of things which would 
 give the greatest alarm to the thoughtful in the higher class, and the greatest 
 suffering to the multitudes at the base of the social scale. But why is it 
 how comes it that we are not in that danger ? that we are not filled with 
 confusion and dismay? Who was it that destroyed the curse of the corn laws, 
 and who was it that fought desperately to maintain that curse ? Surely 
 you know who were accustomed to assemble in the Free-trade Hall, who 
 were largely instrumental in destroying it, and you know that no man was 
 more forward in its support than the man who is now the Prime Minister 
 of England. If this is so if we, the party which we represent on this 
 platform to-night if we did much to promote this prosperity, are we not 
 fairly entitled to offer ourselves as advisers on the question of the franchise? 
 What is called statesmanship is not like any other profession. In other 
 professions failure is acknowledged, and it shuts a man out from distinction 
 and supremacy ; but Lord Derby at this moment is Prime Minister of 
 England whose failures are in the annals of England for thirty years 
 past. In 1834 Lord Derby left Earl Grey's Government because he 
 would not permit even inquiry into the excessive revenues of the 
 Irish Church. But the Irish Church is doomed to destruction. In 
 1846 he left Sir Eobert Peel and became the leader of the Tory 
 Protectionists, becaiise he would not consent to the abolition of the corn 
 laws ; and since then he has been foremost in opposition to all good things 
 in Parliament. Lord Derby is not the leader of his party in a high sense. 
 He is not its educator ; he is not its guide. He is its leader in the foolish 
 contests in which its ignorance and selfishness involves itself with the people. 
 Only three or four days ago I opened a book which professed to be a history 
 of the governing families of England. It is composed of articles, many of 
 which appeared in the Spectator newspaper. There is one on the Stanleys 
 of Knowsley, and they are certainly a governing family, seeing that Lord 
 Derby and Lord Stanley are both of them in the present Government. In 
 opening the book, I find that in the course taken during the agitation of 
 the Reform Act, Lord Stanley, the present Earl of Derby, is stated to have 
 leaped on the table where there was a number of reformers assembled, and 
 to have urged upon them the necessity of refusing the payment of taxes till 
 the Reform Bill was passed. I was not there to see it, but I have heard the 
 story before several times ; I see it recorded in this volume, and I take it 
 therefore to be correct. But Lord Derby in 1852 came forward "to stem 
 the tide of democracy." In 1859 Lord Derby was the author, or head of a 
 Government that proposed a reform bill of a most fraudulent character ; and 
 in 1866 he is the head of a party which has destroyed an honest franchise 
 bill, and has overthrown an honest and patriotic Government. But the 
 newspapers which write in his support tell us that after all this his Govern- 
 ment is not in the least disabled or precluded from dealing with the reform 
 question. I hope no reformer will dream of such a thing. If you like you 
 may trust your life to your most bitter foe ; but I will not do it if I know 
 it. We had free trade from free traders ; for when Sir Robert Peel repealed
 
 1C 
 
 the Corn-law he was as sincere a free trader as if he had spoken free 
 trade for the last five years from this platform on which I stand. But 
 Lord Derby is not a reformer, nor will he introduce a Reform Bill in 
 the character of a reformer. If he introduces one, it will be as before it 
 will be some juggle, some dishonest trick, something base, like the means 
 by which they overthrew the bill of Earl Russell. If that bill had passed, 
 moderate as it was, I undertake to say it would have been received in every 
 part of the United Kingdom with the liveliest satisfaction. It would have 
 given to working men, or to a number of them, a partnership in the State, 
 and I believe that the nation would have been happier and stronger by the 
 passing of that bill. But now discontent is growing growing everywhere, 
 and it will continue to grow until the discontent becomes a great peril in 
 the country, unless a satisfactory measure is introduced and passed through 
 Parliament. I charge Lord Derby and his friends with this. I say that 
 they have brought class into conflict with class. I say that they have done 
 much to separate Parliament from the nation that they have made the 
 House of Commons the reviler and not the protector of the people and 
 further, that they have frustrated the just and beneficent intentions of the 
 Crown. And, in conclusion, I venture upon something which some may 
 deem a foretelling of what is to come. I say that these men who are now 
 in office cannot govern Britain. The middle class and the working class 
 will alike condemn them. They cannot govern Ireland. In that unhappy 
 country their policy has begotten a condition of chronic insurrection which 
 they can never cure. They will be excluded from power, and their policy 
 will be rejected by the people ; for it is on broad, and just, and liberal 
 principles alone that England can maintain her honourable biit not now 
 unchallenged place amongst the great nations of the world. 
 
 ON the evening of the following day, at a Banquet held at the 
 Albion Hotel, in the same city, Mr. Bright, in responding to the 
 toast, " The health of John Bright," said: 
 
 1 am very much obliged to you for the opinion you have expressed 
 of me in such emphatic language; at the same time I am pained to think 
 how much you attribute to me, and how much apparently you expect 
 from me, for I am one of those who think that after all one man can do very 
 little, and in a question like this we have now before, us unassisted, unbacked 
 by the multitudes to whom Mr. Edge has referred, it is almost nothing we 
 can do. However, I hope that amongst us we have been doing 
 a little during the last two days. We know at the concluding 
 meeting of this short Manchester campaign that these meetings have been 
 very different, and each has been remarkable in its way. The first was
 
 17 
 
 enormous beyond counting, and held amid most unfavourable circumstances. 
 Some men coming from Rochdale in a train yesterday morning, in the 
 same carriage with a relative of mine, said they were rather glad than 
 otherwise that it did rain, for if it had not rained people would have 
 said that they came out to enjoy the sunshine; but they would show 
 them that they cared enough for the question of reform to come during a 
 continuous shower of rain. Well, I thought that was rather a plucky 
 idea that my townsman had laid hold of, and I suspect that it was an idea 
 entertained by many present besides Jhimself. The second meeting was also 
 remarkable for its numbers. It was held in the finest hall in this kingdom, 
 and I must say it was, as far as temperature was concerned, the most 
 oppressive meeting which it has been my fortune to attend, for the fact is 
 when we went into the room the temperature, the state of the atmosphere 
 was just such as we expected it would be when we should leave the room ; 
 for the hall had been crammed full for two hours before we entered it; and, 
 therefore, we went into a room where the atmosphere was already 
 much exhausted, and we suffered, many of us, in consequence. To-night 
 we have a very different meeting. It is not numerous beyond counting; 
 but it is very agreeable, and the table has been loaded with every- 
 thing that is wholesome and everything that is elegant for our gratifi- 
 cation; and, after the three meetings, may we not say that, differing 
 as they have differed, still they all had one object, and have been 
 directed to one great purpose. There are different platforms or opinions 
 here, and there is very great difference in the religious world, but still the 
 religious world proposes to itself to march on to one common end. There 
 are differences in this school of politics the reform school but we may 
 still march on to one common end, which is a real representati >:i of the 
 people and the establishment of popular power as supreme in this country. 
 Now, the Reform League, under whose auspices this movement hare was 
 originated it has been carried on jointly by that body and by th.3 Xational 
 Reform Union, and the difference between them is not considerable the 
 Reform League hoists a flag which bears upon it these words, "Manhood 
 suffrage and the ballot." Now, whatever opinion any person may have 
 with regard to the wisdom of immediately, if it was in our power, estab- 
 lishing these principles, or that policy, in an act of Parliament, this, I think 
 no man can doubt, that argument on principle, almost if not altogether 
 unassailable, can be brought in favour of that flag. I speak now on the 
 question of giving a vote to every man. I believe that there is no argument 
 worth listening to for a moment that can be brought against the adoption 
 of the ballot. Although we may differ, I believe the difference arises from 
 this, that many believe that something less than the proposition of the 
 League is sufficient for the purpose of a reform that would make the House 
 of Commons a true representation of the people; and that proposing some- 
 thing short of that which the League proposes, it is believed that the large 
 portion of that middle class, to which Mr. Rumney referred, would in some 
 degree be propitiated, and would be induced to lend their support to the less 
 extensive proposition. I think that is quite true. I believe that the middle 
 classes of this country, speaking of them in any way that you like, by any
 
 18 
 
 kind of measurement for the ascertainment of their opinions, my 
 own honest opinion is that they would consider at this moment that a bill 
 that advanced as far as household suffrage was in itself, considering the 
 opinions of the country, a wiser measure f o r all purposes than that of man- 
 hood suffrage, and they believe it would give to the country a really honest 
 Parliament. A great deal may be said for that. I think myself that opinion 
 is on the whole correct. I do not agree at all with Mr. Rumney in the dreary 
 picture which he gave of the opinion of the middle classes. Why, what is 
 the result of the present system ? I showed last night how entirely almost 
 entirely the people took no part in county elections; that in boroughs 
 the majority of members come from boroughs under 20,000 inhabitants; and 
 yet notwithstanding that, you can elect a Parliament from which the people 
 are so much excluded, and in which the aristocracy and great landowners 
 have enormous power, you can still elect a Parliament which is within a 
 hair's breadth of passing a measure which is, after all, a considerable 'exten- 
 sion of the suffrage; and I believe the same Parliament, if such a measure 
 had been proposed by the Government, would have been almost as near 
 passing a proposition for household suffrage. Therefore, I do not agree with 
 Mr. Rumney. I think his description of the opinions of the middle classes 
 is not accurate. If he will go into any borough in the kingdom, any free 
 borough of any fair size, from which you may draw a fair argument, he will 
 find that no Liberal member can be returned unless he pledges himself to a 
 very considerable extension of the franchise; and that cannot be so, if all 
 the middle class 1 speak not of the Tories if a great majority of the 
 middle class in each borough were not in favour of an extension of the 
 franchise. Well, now, my view of the whole question, and of the difference 
 among reformers, is this: that when one sees a movement a real movement, 
 something grand in its proportions, powerful for the gaining of results the 
 plan of a sensible man who wants to do something, and does not want to 
 split hairs, is to go with that movement and to make the best of it, and to 
 get all that can be got out of it. "Why should we who are called the middle 
 classes see this vast volume of millions of voices gathering and rolling on ? 
 and shall we take no part in it, nor bid it welcome, nor bid it success, nor 
 wish to see the great results which in all probability will be born of it ? I 
 was very sorry to find from the papers the other day that some friends of 
 mine I refer merely to one whose letter I read, in the West Riding of 
 Yorkshire took different views of this matter. I read a very kind an d 
 I am sure, a conscientiously-dictated letter from Mr. Baines, the member 
 for Leeds, to the committee who are organising the great meeting that is to 
 take place in the West Riding, declining the invitation to attend the 
 meeting, on the ground that he was not in favour of manhood suf- 
 frage. Well, I don't blame him in the least for not being in favour 
 of manhood suffrage. I am not in favour of manhood suffrage, as against 
 household suffrage; and the people of Leeds or the West Riding don't want 
 to commit Mr. Baines to manhood suffrage by his attending the meeting. I 
 am not committed to it any the more because I have attended these meet- 
 ings. No doubt it has arisen from Mr. Baines being anxious not to be 
 misrepresented, and being so scrupulous that he should not appear to hold
 
 19 
 
 out expectations to the 'persons attending that meeting which lie was not 
 prepared afterwards to fulfil. But so far as I have seen of the working men 
 in connection with this movement during the last few months, I find them 
 tolerant in a high degree, and considerate and respectful of and to all those 
 who may honestly differ with them in any degree, and are still honestly 
 friendly to the admission of any considerable number of them to the fran- 
 chise. Well, they would admit all to work, and we should all work on with 
 perfect unanimity up to the point where the work parts from us and falls 
 into other hands. Make this movement as large as you like; carry it on 
 from the West Riding to the Northumberland and the Durham districts'; from 
 there to Glasgow; and when it has exhibited itself in Glasgow, perhaps 
 about the beginning of the year, it may reappear in greater proportions than 
 ever in London. Let it take any proportions you please. Finally it will 
 become a question for the deliberations of twelve or fifteen men who will be 
 the Queen's immediate advisers, what shall be the precise measures to be pre- 
 sented to Parliament, and when they discuss this measure they must try to 
 be unanimous, which is not always easy. They must try to ascertain what 
 it is that Parliament will fairly consider and will be likely to pass. More 
 than that. They will have to consider, not merely the voice of those wl: o 
 have attended these great meetings, but that portion of the people who have 
 been silent on this question. They will have to consider that which is 
 called the Conservative opinion of the country the "timid opinion." They 
 will have to consider this, I am not speaking of those who are passionately 
 against all reform, and who hate the very name of popular power, but 1 
 speak of the section much larger, that which lies between us and them, who 
 are quiet stay-at-home people, who probably read their paper and have as 
 good a feeling towards working men as any of us have, but who have not 
 sufficiently considered this question, and who are not courageous enough in 
 spirit to join in a great movement like this. But when the Ministry and 
 the Cabinet come to discuss the measure to be submitted to Parliament, they 
 must seriously take into consideration all this amount of opinion violent 
 some of it; less outspoken, some of it; the quiet opinion of those timid mul- 
 titudes who are at home and out of all this they must determine what is 
 the measure which, in the then condition of public opinion, it is wise to 
 submit to Parliament, because a measure based upon such a view can alone 
 have a chance of passing, and when it is passed can alone be for any 
 considerable period a satisfactory settlement of a great question like 
 this. I say with great deference to my friend Mr. Baines, for whom I 
 have a most unfeigned respect, and whose service in connection with this 
 question can hardly be estimated, I am very sorry that he and others have 
 not found it consistent with their duty to attend these meetings, and 
 to give to them all the support in their power to make of the whole reform 
 feeling and opinion of the country one grand force, because, depend upon 
 it, the resistance is not easily to be surmounted, and we shall not in all 
 probability cut off the enemy in detachments. They appear always in a 
 powerful and united .body, and unless we meet him in the same form and 
 shape, I know not how it is possible that we can eventually triumph. I 
 confess I am here with views which I have expressed for many years on the
 
 20 
 
 question of parliamentary reform. 1 should not split hairs with any measure 
 which may be introduced into Parliament. I am not likely to complain 
 that it goes too far. I should support it if it were an honest and true 
 measure, although I might wish it went further, and when I see a Reform 
 League or a National Reform Union, or any other association of the people, 
 formed for the purpose of advancing this great question, I don't stop to 
 inquire whether they may go a few leagues short of my own terminus, or a 
 few leagues beyond it. But as far as we can go together I go with them ; 
 my views shall be added to theirs, and I trust after a time that the whole 
 voice of the reform party in the country may be so loud that these 300 
 gentlemen of whom I have a very distinct and not always very pleasant 
 recollection, that they may at last admit that the people of this country are 
 in favour of reform ; and that when I have spoken in favour of it in the 
 House of Commons, I have been justified in saying that I expressed the 
 opinions of millions outside that House. I believe the time is coming when 
 this question must be laid hold of by the Government, and that Parliament 
 will feel it dare not treat it in the future as it has treated it in the past. 
 These great meetings, and I think Mr. Mill very wisely and justly said so, 
 are not meetings for discussion so much as they are meetings for demonstra- 
 tion of opinion, and if you like, I will add, for an exhibition of force an 
 exhibition of force of opinion now, and if that force of opinion be despised 
 and disregarded, it may become an exhibition of another kind of force. 
 Now, I have been insulted in past time, not a little in this very city, because 
 I was said to be in favour of peace at any price. I always said I was not in 
 favour of war at any cost, as I think ten years ago my opponents were. I 
 l>elieve that however much any of us may have thought that political questions 
 in our country should never again be settled by force, yet there is something 
 in the constitution of our nature that when evils are allowed to run on beyond 
 a certain period unredressed, the most peace-loving of men are unable to keep 
 the peace. And bear this in mind, however much we may wish political ques- 
 tions to be settled by moral means, yet it is not more immoral for the people 
 to use force in the last resort, for the obtaining and securing of freedom, 
 than it is for the Government to use force to suppress and deny that freedom. 
 I must ask pardon of my friends for touching on what may be termed 
 "abstract principles." We are doubtless a very long way longer than can 
 be measured, I believe and hope, from the time when it will be necessary 
 for us seriously, or for the people of this country, to consider questions of 
 that nature. I think that question was settled in 1832, whether the changes 
 which may be necessary in the government of the United Kingdom can be 
 accomplished by peaceful means, or whether force will be necessary for their 
 completion. At that time force was very nearly necessary, and the opponents 
 of the people saw that and succumbed. Liberty from that time has grown so 
 auuch that vast meetings, 200,000 in number, are gathered together under the 
 countenance of the mayor of a great borough, and the vast multitude was mar- 
 shalled at the place of meeting under the care of the superintendent of police. 
 I have no doubt that the Mayor of Manchester, although he did not preside at 
 the Knot Mill meeting, still sympathised with its object. We have passed 
 tkc time, and may^it never return, when the people of England need to speak
 
 21 
 
 of force in connection with political reform. We have greater means of 
 instruction than we had before. Every man has his newspaper, with the 
 history of the proceedings of the world, on his table every day, and we have 
 freedom to assemble and discuss these questions at our will. The point at 
 which we have arrived of political liberty and instruction and of civilisation, 
 permits us to believe that there is nothing we can fairly claim nothing that 
 could do us good that cannot be obtained by that grand and peaceful move- 
 ment of which the meetings of the last few days have formed so eminent 
 and useful a part. 1 am glad to see Mr. Scales here to-day and the other 
 gentlemen connected with the Reform League. I hope that wheresoever 
 they happen to go they will be received with the cordiality and unanimity 
 they have met in Manchester ; and I hope that when they have gone their 
 round they will have shown to the powers that be to the Government that 
 is, and to the Government that shortly, I hope, is to be that the question 
 of reform has taken deep root in the minds of the whole nation ; and that 
 Parliament may as well shut its doors against every other kind of legislation 
 whatsoever until it consents to pass a bill that shall satisfy the just , i I 
 anxious expectations of the people. 
 
 SPEECH AT LEEDS. 
 
 THE 8th of October being the day fixed upon for the West Biding 
 of Yorkshire Reform Demonstration, Mr. Bright in the evening, 
 by invitation, delivered the following speech in the Leeds Town 
 Hall. On rising he was received with great enthusiasm, the 
 meeting rose en masse, and cheered vigorously for nearly five 
 minutes. When silence was at length restored, the hon. gentleman 
 said : 
 
 Mr. Chairmam and gentlemen, If I accept the address which has just 
 been passed by this meeting, and handed to be by your chairman, be 
 assured that I do it full of feeling feeling in the first place of thankfulness 
 to you for your kindness, and, in the second place, in fear lest in accepting 
 it I should promise to do that which I am wholly unable to perform. 
 Perhaps some of you in your vast meeting to-day have not sufficiently 
 measured the forces which are opposed to you in the carrying of any great 
 measure of reform. I must ask you not to imagine for a moment that it ca 
 be effected, as it were, by one stroke of some victorious arm, but that it 
 must be done, and can enly be done, by the combined and resolute efforts of
 
 22 
 
 millions of people. Mr. Kell, in the observations he has addressed to you, 
 referred to the opinions of a dear and lamented friend of mine. I recollect 
 one thing which he said, and which he said often during the course of our 
 great agitation. It was this, That the West Riding of Yorkshire freely 
 pronouncing its opinion influenced to a large extent the opinion of England, 
 and on some great occasions had finally determined the policy of the Govern- 
 ment. To-day, the West Hiding, in a multitudinous meeting, has spoken 
 with a voice loud enough to be heard all through the nation, and if 1 am not 
 misinformed that vast meeting of which you have formed a part decided by 
 tmanimous consent that the representation of the people in the English 
 House of Commons was bad and unsatisfactory to the last degree. You 
 decided that it was bad not only for what it excluded, but also for what it 
 included; that, whilst it excluded the great bulk of the nation, it included 
 every form of corruption and evil of which a representative system is 
 capable; and you came to resolutions which mean this, that you will change 
 this system if it lies in your power, and that you and the unenfranchised 
 millions will stand that exclusion no longer. I suppose that, after 
 this meeting and the great events of this day, we shall have 
 no end of criticism upon our conduct and our speeches. I find 
 that some writers, criticising the observations I made a fortnight 
 ago in Manchester, complain that I said very much the same 
 thing that I had said at Birmingham. I believe that a charge 
 of this nature was brought, more than two thousand years ago, against 
 one of the wisest of the ancients. They said that he was always saying 
 the same thing about the same thing and he asked them in return whether 
 they expected him to say a different thing about the same thing. I have 
 another answer to make to these critics, and it is this: When they have 
 answered what I have already said about this thing, then I will try to tell 
 them something new. Now, that case which we submit to the thinking 
 portion of our countrymen, is a very simple one. We say that we are the 
 citizens of a country that has had representative institutions for many cen- 
 turies. There is no time to which history goes back when there was not a 
 representative assembly of some kind within the kingdom of England. 
 We say further, that the House of Commons is the only real basis, and the 
 only true security for liberty to the people of these realms. We know 
 everybody knows that the Crown in our day cannot give freedom to the 
 people, neither can it materially impair our freedom. We know further that 
 tlie House of Lords, from its very constitution, from the nature of its being, 
 cannot be relied upon as a safeguard for the freedom of Englishmen. We 
 know that representation, and a just and a fair representation, is 
 that which alone makes a free country. Some of our colonies, now 
 the United States of America, a hundred years ago knew that 
 they could not be represented in the English Parliament. They 
 would not stand taxation from a Parliament in which they were not repre- 
 sented. They threw off, therefore, the supremacy of the English Crown, 
 and declared themselves a free and independent state, and at this moment 
 there is not an English colony, from Canada to New Zealand, that would not 
 also throw off the supremacy of England if the Parliament or Crown of
 
 England denied to it or its representatives a responsible government. In 
 fact there is nothing whatever that distinguishes us from any despotic country 
 in the world, in the matter of political freedom, except the possession of a 
 representative assembly. We have been taught the people of this country 
 have been taught in my opinion foolishly and even wickedly, to hate and 
 despise Russia, Austria, and the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, or Naples as 
 it lately existed, and mainly because those countries were despotic coun- 
 tries in which the people had no influence in their government. Well, then, 
 we come to this conclusion, that the Parliament of England, and mainly the 
 House of Commons, is the foundation of law and order, and that, unless 
 the people are heard in that House, the people are not the source of power, 
 and they themselves are but little removed from a despotism, not of the 
 Crown, but of a privileged and limited class. I believe that the House of 
 Commons has no pretence whatever for its existence except that it speaks 
 for the nation, of which it is a part. It is not established to speak for the 
 Crown and the dynasty; it was not established, and ought not to exist, to 
 speak merely for nobles and great landowners. It has not the pretence to be a 
 popular assembly if it speaks merely for the boroughmongers, and I say 
 that its character is degraded when on its benches can be seen by scores 
 Mr. Moneyf Bags, M. P. , who has walked through corruption into his seat for 
 Lancaster, for Totnes, for Yarmouth, or for a score, or it may be for two or 
 three scores of other boroughs which are very much in the same predica- 
 ment. Whilst speaking for these, for the Crown, for the nobles, for the great 
 landowners, for the boroughmongers, for the men who have purchased their 
 seats in Parliament, the House of Commons is no security for the freedom 
 of the people, and if it speaks for only one out of six or seven of the people, 
 it is no fair representation of the nation. If it exists at all, if it is to be in 
 accordance with the principles of the English constitution, it ought so far 
 to represent all classes of the people that every man, whether he has a vote 
 or not himself, can feel that he has an interest in the House, and that it 
 watches fairly over his rights and his interests. Let us take a case, and if 
 we had a meeting every week during the year, we should have in some way 
 or other fresh cases to dissect. There has been during last week an election 
 in a small town in Wales, the town of Brecon. What happened ? There 
 were two candidates. The carcase was a very small one, but there were 
 candidates ready. One was a gentleman of whom I can say nothing but 
 wliat is in his praise, for I happen to know that he resigned or quitted the 
 representation of the Duke of Marlborough's rotten borough of Woodstock 
 because he would not subject his own honest liberal convictions to the views 
 of his Tory brother, the Duke of Marlborough. Well, Lord Alfred Churchill 
 was one candidate. I forget the name of the other. (A Voice : "Howel 
 Gwyn.") That sounds very Welsh, and is probably correct. There was a 
 furious contest, and great excitement. Public meetings were held and 
 speeches made, and a canvass of the most pertinacious character. I am told 
 that the agents of great and powerful houses were begging, and coax- 
 ing, and compelling, that they might get votes, and the end was the Tory 
 candidate polled 128, and the Liberal candidate 102 votes. So that it took 
 just 230 votes to return this last made member to the House of Commons. Be-
 
 24 
 
 fore the Reform Bill the borough of Brecon was a borough returning, I believe, 
 two members to Parliament, and the electors consisted of ten burgesses. I 
 believe they did not make an even dozen, although they might be 11, and 
 the Reform Bill extended the franchise in Brecon, and added something 
 more than 200 electors, so that 230 have just voted. I ask you whether it is pos- 
 sible there should be any fair representation in a borough like this. I am told, 
 from private sources, and I see it stated in the newspapers, that at least 
 two noble families have been very active through their agents noble 
 families that I am told came in with the Conqueror, and as far as I know it 
 may be the only thing they ever did. They are noble ; but, j udging at least from 
 any observation that I have been able to make, they are obscure and tin- 
 known to an eminent degree. But how can there possibly be any freedom 
 of election in a borough which can only raise 230 voters ? But this is not 
 the only borough of that kind. Let us give, if only for a moment, our 
 attention to one or two facts. In England and Ireland there are 16 boroughs, 
 and the population of each of them is under 5,000, biit they return 22 
 members to Parliament. In England, Wales, and Ireland, there are no less 
 than 72 boroughs, whose population varies from 5,000, but is under 10,000 
 persons, and they return 127 members to the House of Commons. You do 
 not know much about little boroughs; but there are small boroughs in York- 
 shire, as well as in Wales and the south, in which a little compulsion or 
 corruption, or a very acute attorney, or that sort of combination which 
 prevails amongst a few publicans, which may be accounted for if it cannot 
 be justified by the exceptional position in which they are placed, and that 
 exceptional legislation to which they are subjected in these small boroughs 
 any of these things can make the difference whether one man or the other 
 is returned to Parliament. In point of fact, there is no representation in 
 these small boroughs. In them the wishes of the people are nothing ; the 
 opinion of the nation nothing ; the representation is in the hands of 200 or 
 300 electors, manipulated, coaxed, compelled, corrupted, and bribed. Take 
 two cases which have been prominent during the past session, and allow me 
 to touch for a moment on the character of those unjust aspersions which 
 have been thrown out on your character by a gentleman of great ability, 
 capable of doing very great things, but somehow or other, I know not by what 
 means, he is always prevented from doing them. He sits nominally for Calne 
 in the House of Commons. In that borough there are 173 electors, but the 
 Marquis of Lansdowne is the all-prevailing influence in it, and there is no 
 practical or real representation left to the 173 nominal electors. Well, but 
 this gentleman comes to the House of Commons, and you know what he 
 said. I received to-day a letter from the town of Warwick, and I am glad 
 to see it has become a little more lively than it was when 1 knew it on 
 questions of politics. I have received from Warwick a paper in which the 
 calumnies and I believe them to be such uttered against the great body 
 of the working classes are printed on placards and circulated amongst the 
 workshops and cottages of the working classes in that borough. 1 wish they 
 were circulated in every workshop in the kingdom. I say that, unless you 
 turn your faces against the men who thus treated you, who would injure 
 you and then insult you, I do not know to what lengths this language and
 
 conduct may not go in the coming session of Parliament. This gentleman, 
 who has no constituency for the man by whose favour he was returned to 
 the House of Commons has now gone down in the tomb this gentleman, 
 returned to Parliament in defiance of the British constitution, in defiance or 
 the orders of the House of Commons, whk:h has declared that any attempt 
 on the part of any peer to interfere with elections is a breach of privilege 
 this gentleman used this language in speaking of the men to whom the bill 
 brought in by Earl Russell and Mr. Gladstone proposed to give the franchise. 
 He asked us whether, if we wanted venality, ignorance, drunkenness, and 
 the means of intimidation, if we wanted impulsive, unreflecting, violent 
 people, we should go to the top or the bottom. He said he knew what sort 
 of persons lived in these small houses, between seven and ten pounds rental. 
 We have had a long experience of them under the name of freemen, and it 
 would be a good tbing If they were disfranchised altogether. He also said 
 that one of the results of passing this bill, which he did something to pre- 
 vent, would be an increase of corruption, intimidation, disorder, and all 
 those evils which usually happen at elections. And then he describes the 
 second result that the working men of England, finding themselves in a 
 full majority of the whole constituency, would awake to a sense of their 
 power, and would do the most dreadful things, which he describes. He 
 says they would be no longer cajoled at elections. They would set up for 
 themselves. They would have objects to carry as well as their neighbours, 
 and would unite to carry those objects. He says they have the machinery 
 already. They have trades' unions and leaders, and the power of combina- 
 tion, and so describes the terrible and destructive things that you Avould 
 do if you had the franchise, and he says of the House of Commons, "as 
 long as we have not passed this bill, we are masters of the situation." 
 Now, I have said often that I do not in the least blame the speaker for 
 frankly speaking his sentiments. I think the sentiments are altogether 
 erroneous. I think the courage which made him express them very un- 
 fortunate, but I only consider the sentiments of importance because they 
 were welcomed with enthusiasm, and apparently by an unanimous consent, 
 by the whole Tory party in the House. But there is another gentleman who 
 does not sit on our side of the House, and who now, by favour of Lord 
 Derby, governs 100,000,000 of people in British India. That gentleman sits 
 for a rotten borough also. If the member for Calne sits by favour of one 
 marquis, the member for Stamford sits by favour of another marquis ; and 
 he was the man who assailed Mr. Gladstone with an unusual perhaps in 
 him not unusual but with a notable animosity, because Mr. Gladstone said 
 that the great body of the unenfranchised men of England were worthy of 
 consideration, for they were our own flesh and blood. I say that the House of 
 Commons, according to the spirit and meaning of the British constitution, and 
 according to the spirit and meaning of its own standing orders, has no 
 right to admit within its walls any man representing not a free constituency of 
 his countrymen, but representing only a single lord and peer of the realm. 
 Now, if there be in that House of Commons not a few of this class; if there be 
 many representatives of half-a-dozen great landowners who sit for counties, 
 is it to be wondered at that liberal measures make so small and difficult
 
 progress within the walls of that House. I was very "much struck towards 
 the end of the last session by an answer that was'given to me by one of the 
 most accomplished members of that House, who has taken his seat there 
 only since the last election, and I believe there is no onan in the House 
 whose opinion on a point like this ! more worthy of attention. I asked him, 
 as he had sat there from the beginning of the session, say from February till 
 the month of June, what he thought of the House of Commons. His 
 answer was given to me in language of positive sorrow. He said that he 
 was shocked and discouraged, by what he had seen, for he said, I think this is 
 a House in which no good can be done. Now, for what are we met here 
 to-night, and for what did I will not say one hundred or two hundred 
 thousand, or a quarter of a million, but a multitude whom no man could 
 count, why did that multitude to-day quit all its usual labours and avoca- 
 tions, march long miles through your country, to gather on your neighbour- 
 ing moor ? It was to protest against this state of things, and if possible, to 
 change it, and we are resolved now, you agree with me we are resolved 
 (great cheering, the meeting rising, and waving handkerchiefs) that every 
 member who sits in the House of Commons shall have a free constituency 
 and that the working men in the United Kingdom shall form a fair portion 
 of every free constituency. We propose, in fact, to restore the representation, 
 and to restore the fair and free action of the English constitution. We believe 
 that there is a spirit created in London, in Birmingham, in South Lancashire, 
 in the West Riding of Yorkshire, in the Newcastle and Durham district, and 
 in Glasgow and the west of Scotland, there is a power rising which, fairly 
 combined, can do all this. The working men must combine, and they must 
 subscribe. A penny a week or a penny a month from the thousands and 
 from the millions would raise funds that would enable you to carry on the 
 most gigantic and successful agitation that this country has ever seen. It 
 is mainly your own voice that will decide your own fate. I do not quite 
 agree with some of the observations of our chairman. the observations 
 which have been made to-night, as if there were a chasm between you and 
 the middle class. It is not so, and it ought not to be so, and if you will take 
 out small boroughs, in which the middle class themselves are not inde- 
 pendent, you \vill find in nearly all the great towns of the kingdom that there 
 is a powerful middle class influence in favour of the enfranchisement of the 
 working classes ; and bear in mind further, that even of that higher class in 
 the social scale that class which has great wealth, and high title, and great 
 privilege, that in the history of England there has always been men to stand 
 out from that class, and to contend for liberty with the great body of their 
 countrymen. If the nation is to be split into two parts, and there is to be 
 a wide gulf between, there is nothing for the future but subjection or vio- 
 lence, for without this you are powerless to attain your ends. But, working 
 with a large portion of the middle class, and with the most intelligent and just 
 of the highest social class, we may find these great measures accomplished 
 without the violation of public peace, and without any disruption of the 
 general harmony which ought to prevail throughout all classes of the people. 
 Therefore I say this, rely mainly upon yourselves, for you are the great 
 nation excluded. See what you have done. I am not saying this to flatter,
 
 27 
 
 for no word of flattery to the working class or to any other class ever passed 
 my lips ; but when I look over this country, and see the cities you b.ave 
 built, the railroads you have made, the manufactures you have produced, 
 the cargoes which freight the ships of the greatest mercantile nation the 
 world has ever seen, when I see that you have converted by your labour 
 what was once a wilderness, these islands, into a fruitful garden, when I 
 know that you have created this wealth, and that you are a nation whose 
 name is a word of power throughout all the world, then I feel 
 confident, by your united exertions, in conjunction with the middle 
 class, you can overthrow for ever the domination of the class of which 
 you complain. The few meetings which have been held since the close of 
 the last session of Parliament have had a prodigious effect. There are news- 
 paper writers who could not sea a bit from January to July, and now the 
 scales are, as it were, dropping from their eyes, and this gradual improve- 
 ment of vision is going on moat extensively throughout the country, and it 
 is said now that the Tories are half repenting the course which they took 
 during the last session. And when I say that Lord Derby is not a reformer 
 they charge me with railing at Lord Derby, and they say that it is a positive 
 case of injustice to charge the Tories with being hostile to reform. Well, 
 my memory may not be as accurate as that of some people, but I do recol- 
 lect that during the last session 280 gentlemen who call themselves Tories 
 objected to Mr. Gladstone's bill because it proposed to admit, according to 
 Mr. Gladstone's estimate, 204,000 working men, some of the unenfranchised 
 5,000,000, to the suffrage. It may be that the Tories did not care about 
 this, and that all they wanted was power and place. Now, Lord Derby, in 
 the speech which he made just after he came into office, intimated in very 
 distinct language that if he had refused to accept it when the Queen offered 
 it it would have been the break up of his party, for they had looked on the 
 Treasury benches so long, and with such intenseness of vision, with such 
 eagerness, with such hunger for what there is there, that if he, even for six 
 months, had not allowed them to get there, they would have said that he 
 was not worth following that they gave up the chase, and would not follow 
 it any longer. Well, for this what did they do ? They wasted a whole 
 session . They have disturbed the whole country, and having made these 
 great meetings necessary, they have disgusted and estranged the unenfran- 
 chised classes merely to supplant Earl Russell in one House and Mr. 
 Gladstone in the other. In America there are many political parties. 
 There is a party that is always seeking office, and it goes by the name of 
 "the bread and butter party," and it turns out after all that the party of 
 Lord Derby is not an anti-reform party, but a bread and butter party. For 
 six months' office, or it may run to nine or twelve months, they have rejected 
 an honest and good measure, they have betrayed the true interests of the 
 people, and I believe I have seen men on that bench who would sell the 
 mace, which is the symbol of loyalty, on the table of the House, if by doing 
 so they could give to themselves fixity of tenure on the ministerial benches. 
 Now, I must ask you in all seriousness to let the country know what is our 
 object, what we propose, and how far we are honestly asking for what we 
 believe to be good. I shall not appeal to the writers in newspapers, one of
 
 28 
 
 whom, and not a very creditable one, is concealed somewhere in this town. 
 I shall appeal only to the truth-loving vast majority of the people of this 
 country. Our object is this, to restore popular representation in this country, 
 and to make the House of Commons the organ and representative of the 
 nation, and not of a small class of it. If you look over all the world you will 
 now see that representation is extending everywhere, and the degree of its 
 completeness is becoming the measure of national liberty, not only on the 
 North American continent, but in the nations and kingdoms of old Europe. 
 I have mentioned the North American continent. To-morrow is a great day 
 in the United States, when perhaps millions of men will go to the poll, and 
 they will give their votes on the question whether justice shall or shall not 
 be done to the liberated African, and in a day or two we shall hear the result, 
 and I shall be greatly surprised if that result does not add one more proof 
 to those already given, of the solidity, intelligence, and public spirit of the 
 great body of the people of the United States. I have mentioned the North 
 American continent. I refer to the colonies which are still part of this 
 empire as well as to those other colonies which now form a great and free 
 republic. It was towards the end of the fifteenth century that the grand 
 old Genoese discovered the new world. A friend of mine, Cyrus W. Field, of 
 New York is the Columbus of our time, for after no less than forty passages 
 across the Atlantic in pursuit of the great aim of his life, he has, at length, 
 by his cable, moored the new world close alongside the old. To speak from 
 the United Kingdom to the North American continent, and from North 
 America to the United Kingdom, is now but the work of a moment of time, 
 and it does not require the utterance even of a whisper. The English nations 
 are brought together and they must inarch on together. The spirit of either 
 Government must be the same, although the form may be different. A 
 broad and generous freedom is the heritage of England, and our purpose is . 
 this, to establish that freedom for ever on the sure foundation of a broad and 
 generous representation of the people. 
 
 SPEECHES AT GLASGOW. 
 
 ON the 16th of the same month, having been invited to address the 
 Reformers of Glasgow, Mr. Bright visited that city on the occasion 
 of the Reform Demonstration ; and in the City Hall in the evening 
 he delivered the following speech to an overflowing and enthusiastic 
 audience. He said : 
 
 Mr Chairman, and citizens of no mean city, I accept this address which has 
 been read in your hearing and presented to me, with a feeling of deep gratitude to 
 those who have expressed such friendly feelings towards me, but with a deep
 
 29 
 
 anxiety when I consider the intent and purport of the document. I am consoled 
 by regarding it as in some degree a compact or covenant entered into to-night by 
 you and those whom you represent, with me and those whom I may be supposed 
 in some degree to represent, and that we covenant together that whatsoever is 
 moral for us to do we engage to do in the prosecution of that great cause which 
 has stirred the heart of Glasgow to-day. I can do but little any one man can 
 do but little ; but you in your vast numbers can do much, and, uniting with 
 numbers, not smaller in other parts of the kingdom, I have a strong sense 
 that the day is fast approaching which will see the triumph of our cause, and I 
 think he must be blind and foolish indeed who is not willing to admit that it is 
 a great issue whish is now submitted to the people of the United Kingdom. 
 Gatherings of scores of thousands of men, extending from south to north, must 
 have some great cause. Men do not leave their daily labour, the necessary 
 occupations of their lives, thus to meet, unless they believe there is some great 
 question submitted to them in which they have a deep and overpowering interest. 
 And the question is this Whether in future the government and the legislation 
 of this country shall be conducted by a privileged class in a sham Parliament, 
 or on the principles of the constitution of the nation, through its representatives, 
 fairly and freely choosen. Now there are persons who will think that I am 
 speaking harshly of the existing Parliament. Some probably in this meeting 
 may think that Mr. Beales was indiscriminate in the term which he used when 
 he spoke of our representation being steeped in corruption ; but I ani certain 
 that if the representation of this country existed in any other country, and that 
 its details were explained to Englishmen, there are not five Englishmen within 
 the bounds, or five Britons within the bounds of this island, who would not 
 admit that the language he has applied to the Parliament was correct. Now, 
 what we charge against the Parliament is this that it is chosen from consti- 
 tviencies not only so small that they do not and cannot adequately represent the 
 nation, but from constituencies so small as to be influenced by corruption, and 
 by all kind of motives that are neither national nor patriotic. In our boroughs, 
 for example, the numbers for the most part are very small. There are, I think, 
 '254 burghs in the United Kingdom, but there are only 54 of these that possess a 
 constituency of 2,000 electors and upwards, and large and fair constituencies 
 arc indeed the exception. In Scotland, your burgh constituencies, though not 
 generally very large, are larger than those in England, and to your honour it 
 must be said that they are far more incorrupt than English constituencies. In 
 the counties the freeholders those who hold land for cultivation are constantly 
 diminishing in numbers, and that portion of the constituencies which is not 
 composed of freeholders, is composed of tenant farmers the most dependent 
 class of occupiers, probably in the nation. But now, let me point to one or two 
 facts which should sink deep in the minds of all men. Out of every 100 grown 
 men in the United Kingdom 84 have no votes. Those 84 might just as well, 
 for all purposes of constitutional government, so far as they are directly 
 concerned those 84 might as well live in Eussia, where there is no 
 electoral system of government, or in those other countries, now very few 
 indeed, in which Parliaments and representations are unknown. If it be the 
 fact that only sixteen men out of every hundred have votes, it is also the fact 
 that those 16 are so arranged, and so placed, that their representation is in
 
 80 
 
 reality almost entirely destroyed. If the electors were fairly divided amongst 
 all the members, there would be nearly 2,000 eleetors to every member ; but 
 what is the state of things? Why, that one-third of the House of Commons, 
 or 220 members, are actually elected by 70,000 votes that is to say, that 220 
 members of the House of Commons are chosen by a number of men scattered 
 over the country, who are fewer by almost one-half than the number of grown 
 men in this city of Glasgow alone. And further, one-half of the House of Com- 
 mons is chosen by about 180,000 electors, being only one-seventh of the whole 
 number of electors, and much below the number of men who are to be found in 
 the cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. And if we come to that great event which 
 excites so mueh interest, but which is generally of so little value a general 
 election we find, I believe, that not more than 10 in 100 not more than ten 
 per cent, of the whole grown-up male population of the United Kingdom ever 
 come to the poll and give their vote for the election of a new Parliament. Now, 
 with regard to a general election, some of you have read, and many of you know 
 something of the cost and corruption of a general election. I will give you one 
 instance and one proof of it. It has been my opinion all along that it was the 
 duty of the Government of Lord Russell, after the defeat of their Reform Bill 
 during the last session, to have dissolved the Parliament. I have no reason to 
 disbelieve what is asserted, that Lord Russell himself was of that opinion, but 
 a general election was a burden which the members of Parliament did no; 
 to bear. I was speaking to a member of the Government on this question 
 about the time when the resignation of the late Government was just about t ; 
 be submitted to the Queen, and I was telling him that I thought the true policy, 
 the constitutional policy, of the Government was to dissolve the Parliament. 
 A portion of his answer was this : A member who sits on our side of the House 
 had spoken to him about it. He said, "My election has already cost me 
 6,000" and he added, "I have, besides, 3000 more to pay." He said fur- 
 ther, what was very reasonable, that this was a heavy burden, that it was 
 grievous to be borne, that it put him to exceeding inconvenience, and, if the 
 Parliament were dissolved, he could not afford to fight his county or his borough, 
 as the case might be, but would be obliged to retire from the field, and leave the 
 contest, if there should be a contest, to some one else. You will believe, then, that 
 the Government were greatly pressed by this consideration, and this considera- 
 tion, added, it maybe, toothers, induced them to resign office rather than to dis- 
 solve Parliament. Thus you have a proof that whereas general corruption and 
 putridity are the destruction of most bodies which they affect, the corruption of 
 the present Parliament was, and is, the cause of its present existence. New 
 bear in mind that this state of things which I have been describing obtains at 
 the present moment, 34: years after the passing of the great Reform Bill. 
 What the Government must have been before that bill was passed it is scarcely 
 possible to describe or to imagine ; but I have no doubt of this, that it was one 
 of the worst governments in civilised countries, and in Europe ; and I think 
 this may be fairly argued from the fact of the incessant wars in which the coun- 
 try was engaged for loO years before that reform ; from the enormous debt 
 that was created ; from the crushing taxes that were fixed upon the people ; and, 
 worse almost than that, from that most infamous law which ever passed a 
 Parliament of civilised men the law which limited the supply of bread to the
 
 31 
 
 people. Now, if the Clerk of the House of Commons were placed at Temple 
 Bar, and if he had orders to tap upon the shoulder every we 11-dressed and ap- 
 parently cleanly-washed man who passed through that ancient bar, until 
 he had numbered 658 ; and if the Crown summoned these 658 to 
 be the Parliament of the United Kingdom, my honest conviction is 
 that you would have a belter Parliament than now exists. Now this assertion 
 will stagger some timid and some good men ; but let me explain myself to you. 
 It would be a Parliament, every member of which would have no direct con- 
 stituency, but it would be a Parliament that would act as a jury that would take 
 some heed of the facts and arguments laid before it. It would be free, at any 
 rate, from the class prejudices which weigh upon the present House of Com- 
 mons. It would be free from the overshadowing pressure of what are called 
 noble families. It would owe no allegiance to great landowners, and I hope it 
 would have fewer men amongst it seeking their own gains by entering Parlia- 
 ment. With the Parliament which we have now and have had, facts and 
 arguments go for very little. Take that question to which I have referred, of 
 limiting the supply of bread to the people. The corn law was on the statute- 
 book for 31 years 16 years before the Eeform Bill, and 15 years after the 
 passing of that bill but from the first hour of its enactment until the hour of 
 its destruction the facts and the arguments against it were equally clear and 
 equally conclusive. They would not be convinced though one rose from the 
 dead, and that which convinced them at last was the occurrence of a great 
 famine in Ireland, which destroyed or drove from the country hundreds of 
 thousands of the citizens of the empire. I maintain with the most perfect 
 conviction that the House of Commons, representing as it now does counties 
 and boroughs such as I have described, does not represent the intelligence and 
 the justice of the nation, but the prejudices, the privileges, and the selfishness 
 of a class. Now, what are the results of this system of legislation ? Some of 
 them have been touched upon in that address which has been so kindly pre- 
 sented to me. You refer to the laws affecting land. Are you aware of a fact 
 which I saw stated the other day in an essay on this subject that half the land 
 of England is in the possession of fewer than 150 men ? Are you aware of the 
 fact that half the land in Scotland is in the possession of not more than 10 or 1 2 
 men ? Are you awaro of the fact that the monopoly in land in the United 
 Kingdom is growing constantly more and more close ? And the result of it is 
 this the gradual extirpation of the middle class as owners of land, and the 
 constant degradation of the tillers of the soil. Take a matter about which many 
 Scotch farmers know something take the perpetual grievance of the game laws. 
 In the House of Commons that question can scarcely be discussed. The landed 
 intei^st, as it did in the late cattle plague debate, tramples down Government 
 and borough members and everybody and everything that thwarts their inclina- 
 tion. Take the general I ara sorry to say the too general subserviency of 
 the tenant farmers in the matter of elections in your country in Scotland. I 
 entertain the hope that you will lead the way to the deliverance of the farmers 
 from this slavery. In the last elections for Kincardineshire and for Aberdeen- 
 shire, the tenant farmers have taken the politics of those counties into their 
 own hands. I hope, and I believe, that the tenant farmers of Scotland the 
 most enlightened agriculturists that live on the face of the earth I hope they,
 
 with pei-fect justice, and perfect courtesy to their landowners, will still exert 
 their legitimate and right influence in the election of members for the counties 
 of Scotland. But take what some of you cannot comprehend take the help- 
 less poverty of the farm labourers in the southern counties of England. Their 
 wages are very low. Their helplessness is extreme. Their power to deliver 
 themselves their power to combine seems at the lowest ebb. Look at their 
 ignorance ! A friend of mine a member of the House of Commons, who lives 
 within six miles of the Royal town and Castle of Windsor, told me only the 
 other day that he knew the case of a family near his house in which there had 
 grown up eleven children, not one of whom could read or write in the least 
 degree. And he said that he had lately had in his employ upon his property 
 seven men, of whom four could neither read nor write, two of them could 
 read most imperfectly, and one of them could read and write about as 
 well as the other two could read. Bear in mind that all this exists 
 within six miles of the Royal Castle of Windsor. It exists in a neigh- 
 bourhood where lords and squires and established clergymen swarm. Such is 
 the state of ignorance of that population at this moment. In the county from 
 which I come, girls of the age of from fifteen to twenty years are earning ; many 
 of them, I believe, double the weekly wages of the able-bodied farm labourer, 
 the head and father of a family, in some of the southwestern counties of 
 England. But what must be the ignorance of that population with such wages 
 offering to them in Lancashire and Yorkshire that they scarcely hear of them. 
 They seem to have no aspiration to better their condition, and there is no 
 sensible emigration from these wretched counties to the more prosperous coun- 
 ties of the north. Your address refers to pauperism the gulf of pauperism. 
 In the United Kingdom at this moment there are more than 1,200,000 paupers. 
 The pauperism of the United Kingdom last year and it will not cost less, 1 
 believe, this year cost the ratepayers those who pay taxes for the relief of the 
 poor more than seven a half millions sterling, and this does not include many 
 thousands of vagrants who also come occasionally under the name of paupers. 
 Now look, I beg of you, to this mass of misery. It is so great a mass that 
 benevolence cannot reach it. If benevolence could do it, there would be no 
 pauperism in England, for in no country do I believe that there is more benevo- 
 lence than there is in the United Kingdom. The kindness of the women of 
 England is beyond all measure and beyond all praise of mine. There does not 
 exist among created beings, beneath the angelic ranks, those who are more kind 
 and charitable than the women of the United Kingdom. But benevolence can 
 touch scarcely the fringe of this vast disorder. There is another virtue we could 
 add, and that virtue and that quality is justice. It is not benevolence but 
 justice that can deal with giant evils. It was not benevolence that gave the 
 people bread twenty years ago, but it was justice embodied in the abolition of a 
 cruel and a guilty law. But justice is impossible from a class. It is most 
 certain and easy from a nation ; and I believe we can only reach the depths of 
 ignorance and misery and crime in this country by an appeal to the justice, the 
 intelligence, and the virtue of the entire people. That address has mentioned 
 another question the question of your national expenditure, of your army and 
 navy ; and I will state only one fact with regard to the navy. I believe since 
 the great war, since 1815, that the navy of this country has cost more than four
 
 33 
 
 hundred millions sterling. I believe that during the last six years it has cost 
 as much as the United States navy during the same time : we have heen in a 
 condition of profound peace ; the United States have had to build or buy six 
 hundred ships, to man them, to furnish them with munitions of war, and to 
 fight them during the greatest struggle that any nation ever waged. And yet at 
 this moment, after spending so much, we have Sir John Pakington, the great 
 recoustructor, coming into office, and promising, not to extend the liberties of 
 the people, but to reconstruct a navy on which such enormous and countless 
 sums have already been sunk. Then, take the taxes. Well, something has 
 been done to make the taxes more eq ual ; but take the taxes which are levied 
 under the name of probate and legacy and succession duties ; and I will give 
 you a case which it is just possible you have heard before from my lips. A. 
 member of the House of Commons at least he was so when he gave me this 
 fact, though I am sorry to say he is not one now a member of the House of 
 Commons told me he had had left to him by a person not related to him by 
 blood an estate in land worth 21,000 ; the timber upon it was worth 11,000 ; 
 altogether 32,000. The tax, when the property is left to a person who is not 
 a relation of the man who leaves it, is 10'per cent. ; the tax therefore on 32,000 
 would be 3,200 ; and if any one of you received a legacy like that in cash, in 
 shares, in ships, in stock-in-trade, in any of those things which are not lands 
 and houses, he would pay 3,200. But my friend receiving his legacy in 
 land, and the timber upon it, paid just 700. And why ' For this reason 
 only, that the law was made by a landed and propertied Parliament, and 
 the owners and inheritors of lands and houses were considered specially 
 worthy of its regard. But I may be asked and no doubt some 
 man who, after this meeting, will take up his pen to write a criticism 
 on my speech, or upon this meeting, will ask how comes it, if Par- 
 liament is so bad, that so many good things have been done by Parliament 
 during the last thirty or forty years ? I acknowledge that good thiugs have 
 been done, and I ought to know, because I have been concerned in the doing 
 of some of them. But by whom were they done? Mainly by that force in 
 Parliament which is sent there by the great and free borough constituencies of 
 the kingdom. The members for the great towns although but a minority, 
 and not a very large minority are the moving force by which these good 
 things have been done. It has not been the policy of the Tories to do good 
 things and I have seen the time when the Whigs have been much less 
 zealous about them than t could have wished. They have sprung from tha 
 people, and the peoplo have carried them. What there has been of real 
 representation in Parliament has urged these measures forward. What there 
 has been of sham representation has uniformly opposed these measures. 
 Now, I am of opinion that the rich people of a country, invested with power, 
 and speaking generally for rich people alone, cannot sufficiently care for the 
 multitude and the poor. They are personally kind enough, but they do not 
 care for the people in the bulk. They have read a passage in Holy Writ that 
 " The poor ye have always with you" and therefore they imagine that it is a 
 providential arrangement that a small section of the people should be rich 
 end powerful, and that the great mass of the people should be hardworking 
 and poor. It is a long distance from castles, and mansions, and great houses, 
 
 o
 
 and abounding luxuries, to the condition of the great mass of the people *ho 
 have no property, and too many of whom are almost always on the verge of 
 poverty. We know very well all of us how much we are influenced l>y the 
 immediate circumstances by which we are surrounded. The rich find every- 
 thing just as they like. The country needs no reform. There is no country 
 ia the world so pleasant for rich people as this country. But I deny alto- 
 gether that the rich alone are qualified to legislate tor the poor, any more than 
 that the poor alone would be qualified to legislate for the rich. TJy honest 
 belief is, that if we could be all called upon to legislate for all, that all would 
 be more justly treated, and would be mora happy than we are now. We should 
 have then an average; we should have the influence of wealth and of high 
 culture, and of those qualities that come from lei sun?, and the influence of 
 those robuster qualities that come from industry and from labour. Suppose 
 now, without arguing for this or that particular measure of Keforni, that we 
 could add another million to the existing constituencies, what would be the 
 result ? We should modify the constituencies. Instead of the people coming 
 to the hustings at the nomination and holding up their hands for this candi- 
 date or that, and having for the most part no power in the election, the inha- 
 bitants of the town would have a much greater power than they have now. 
 The constituency would be less open to management than it is at present; 
 majorities on one side or the other would be larger and less open to corrup- 
 tion ; and we should have members whosa opinions and whose conduct would 
 be modified by this infusion of new and fresh blood into the constituents 
 which send them to Parliament. We should do this further we should bring 
 the rich and the great more into contact with the people, and into a better 
 acquaintance with human wants and with the necessities and feelings of their 
 countrymen. What other thing would happen ? I dare venture to assert 
 this, that Parliament then would not revile and slander the people as it does now. 
 Nor would it cheer with frantic violence when their countrymen are described in 
 hideous and hateful colours. Probably what I call the Botany Bay view of their 
 countrymen would be got rid of, and we should have a sense of greater justice 
 and generosity in the feeling with which they regard the bulk of the ration. 
 And if there was more knowledge of the people there would assuredly be more 
 sympathy with them ; and I believe the legislation of the House, being more 
 in accordance with the public sentiment, would be wiser and better in every 
 respect. The nation would be changed. There would be amongst us a 
 greater growth of everything that is good. I should like to ask if there are 
 any ministers of religion in this audience. I have sometimes thought that I 
 should like to have an audience of 4,000 or 5,000 of them, to whom I could 
 preach a political sermon, and to whom. I could teD something which I fear 
 their theological schools have failed to teach them. An eminent man cf your 
 country, the late Dr. Chalmers, in speaking of the question of free trade, and 
 particularly of the struggle for the abolition of the corn laws, uttered some mem- 
 orable words. He said he thought there was nothing fiat would tend so to 
 sweeten the breath of British society as the abolition of the corn laws. I believe 
 now that there is nothing which would tend so to sweeten the breath of British 
 society as the admission of a large and generous number of the working 
 classes to citizenship and the exercise of the fraudiiiT. >"ow, if my words
 
 35 
 
 should reach the ears and reach the heart of any man who is interested 
 in the advancement of religion in this country, I ask him to consider whether 
 there are not great political obstacles to the extension of civilisation and 
 morality and religion within the bounds of the United Kingdom. We 
 believe these ministers, you, and I we believe in a Supreme Ruler of the 
 Universe. We believe in His omnipotence ; we believe and we humbly trust 
 in His mercy. We know that the strongest argument which is used against 
 that belief, by those who reject it, is an argument drawn from the misery, and 
 the helplessness, and the darkness of so many of our race, even in countries 
 which call themselves civilised and Christian. Is not that the fact ? If I 
 believed that that misery, and that helplessness, and that darkness could not 
 be touched or transformed, I myself should he driven to admit the almost 
 overwhelming force of that argument; but I am convinced that just laws, 
 and an enlightened administration of them, would change the face of the 
 country. I believe that ignorance and suffering might be lessened to an 
 incalculable extent, and that many an Eden, beauteous in flowers and rich 
 in fruits, might be raised up in the waste wilderness which spreads before us. 
 But no class can do that. The class which has hitherto ruled in this country 
 has failed miserably. It revels in power and wealth, whilst at its feet, a 
 terrible peril for its future lies the multitude which it has neglected. If a 
 class has failed, let us try the nation. That is our faith, that is our purpose, 
 that is our cry Let us try the nation. This it is which has called together 
 these countless numbers of the people to demand a change ; and, as I think 
 of it, and of these gatherings, sublime in their vastness and in their resolution, 
 I think I see, as it were, above the hill tops of time, the glimmerings of the 
 dawn of a better and a nobler' day for the country and for the people that I 
 love so well. 
 
 ON the following morning Mr. Bright was entertained at a public 
 breakfast at the Gobden Hotel, in the same city, when several 
 speeches were delivered. Mr. Bright spoke as follows, after a 
 reference to the complimentary remarks to himself of previous 
 speakers : 
 
 Passing away from sentiment to business, it occurs to me that, although 
 it is now a long time since Scotland and England were united as one country, 
 and although they are, as I believe, for ever, so far as we can see, inseparably 
 united, yet, being in Scotland, it is hardly possible to consider any public 
 question without some direct reference to Scottish interests. The position 
 of this part of the United Kingdom on the question of reform is one 
 very peculiar, and one having a special interest. Scotland has as I 
 think every fair man will admit, not her proper share in the omposition 
 of the House of Commons. I am not quite certain now what is the increaesd 
 number of members that Scotland should have, judging arithmetically from 
 her population, her wealth, and her contribution to the public taxes ; but I 
 think the increase should not be much short of twenty members. In a bill
 
 36 
 
 which I brought before the public soon after I was here eight years ago, and 
 for the preparation of which I was greatly indebted to my hon. relative the 
 member for Edinburgh in that bill I think I proposed that an addition of 
 fifteen or sixteen Mr. M'Laren says he thinks it was eighteen additional 
 members, should be given to Scotland. In the bill which the late Govern- 
 ment introduced to the House of Commons, I think the addition proposed was 
 seven. That was a measure of partial, rather of scanty, justice ; but still it 
 was looked upon with extreme jealousy, and was met by a strong threatened 
 opposition on the part of the Tory party in the House. I am not very much 
 surprised at the jealousy and the threatened opposition which I find in discuss- 
 ing the question of Reform. The Tories, members of the present Government, 
 their supporters in Parliament, and their newspapers, constantly regard the 
 question as one which is to add power to or take power from a given party. 
 They discuss it as if it were not a question as it is not with them of justice 
 to all the people, and of a fair representation to all classes, but as it may 
 interfere with and affect then: particular party interests. Therefore it was not 
 to he wondered at that, seeing the condition of the representation of Scotland, 
 the members of the present Government, then the leaders of the Opposition, 
 and their friends in Parliament, should look with great hostility upon any 
 proposition that proposed to transfer members from small, corrupt, and rotten 
 boroughs in England, to independent, moral, and sober constituencies in this 
 part of the island. But the English people, I believe, certainly the English 
 reformers, have no such jealousy, because they accept freely the entire, the 
 thorough, the perpetual union of the two countries, and therefore they regard 
 every Scotchman as they regard an Englishman in this question of reform, 
 and they have this additional inducement to do so, because they know at lease 
 that the Scottish people in their representation will do as well for England and 
 for Englishmen certainly as any part of England does for itself or 
 for Scotland. Your representation is in a peculiar position, as compared with 
 that of any other portion of the United Kingdom. In the first place, you send 
 no Tory members for any of your boroughs. There are two of your borough 
 members, who did not behave very well during the last session of Parlia- 
 ment, and who, I believe, disappointed their constituencies very much ; and 
 if their constituencies had been sitting in the gallery of the House of Com- 
 mons, and had heard all that took place, I am not sure that their doubts of 
 the fidelity of those members would not have been very much strengthened. 
 But still your borough constituencies are in this condition that not only do 
 they return no Tory to Parliament, but there is no Tory party in any one of 
 those boroughs sufficiently strong to feel itself justified in proposing a Tory 
 candidate for the approbation of the constituency. That is a very satisfactory 
 state of things. I could give some reasons for it which probably have not 
 struck some people in England, and perhaps have not occurred to people in 
 Scotland. One reason is that you have no boroughs so small as the very 
 small boroughs in England ; secondly, that your population, as a whole, stands 
 in a higher position with regard to education and political intelligence; and 
 thirdly, you have in Scotland (I speak of the Established, apart from what 
 may be called the Free Churches) a church establishment which, though I 
 think a church establishment may be considered to le politically and reli-
 
 37 
 
 giously an evil, yet you have a church establishment of a liberal and even of a 
 republican form of government as compared with the hierarchical establish- 
 ment of England. And in Scotland tke boundaries of the Established Church 
 do not, with any degree of accuracy, if they do at all, mark out the boundaries 
 of a political party. In England it is otherwise, and the Established Church, 
 of England is, in point of fact (with, of course, a multitude of exceptions), 
 the Tory party of England. These are the reasons, I believe, why in this 
 country your representation is, in my opinion, so much more creditable to 
 your intelligence and advantageous to the empire than that of other parts of 
 the United Kingdom. Your counties, however, are not in a position so dis- 
 tinguished as your boroughs ; but I was glad to have the testimony two years 
 ago of one of your county members, and a highly respectable member too, to 
 the fact that the counties were, as I think, making progress, but as doubtless, 
 he thought, were going backward. I met him in the Highlands, and in the 
 intervals of some Highland games that were proceeding we discussed a little 
 of politics, and the difference between the constituencies of Scotland and 
 England. He said, with rather a melancholy air and sadness in his voice, 
 " Yes, you have got all the boroughs in Scotland," meaning the Liberal party, 
 " and you are gradually taking all the counties." That statement has re- 
 ceived some confirmation since then. Two counties to which I referred last 
 night, Kincardineshire and Aberdeenshke, have returned members not of that 
 party which has hitherto dominated amongst the landed proprietors, and there 
 is some reason to believe that the complaint which has made its appearance 
 among the tenant farmers of those counties may prove infectious or 
 contagious, and may spreid over their borders and infect other coun- 
 ties as well. I cannot believe, for example, that in the county of 
 Haddington the tenant farmers will consent to be represented long as 
 they are now. "When I look back to the conduct of the member for that 
 county at the last election oil the hustings ; when I look to his conduct in the 
 House of Commons with regard to the requirements and interests of the people, 
 and in connection with this question of reform, I will never believe, until the 
 Scotch people are wholly changed, that there can be in any county of Scotland 
 a population, or an electoral body even, that can be in favour of representation 
 by a gentleman whose performances have been so marked in a direction adverse, 
 as I believe, and as I think they believe, to the true interests of the people. 
 The Scottish farmers are, probably, the best agriculturists in Europe, and it is 
 a great pleasure, not only to travel through the Highlands of your country, 
 but to travel through the Lowlands, where there is so much fertility, and where 
 the harvests bear testimony to the industry and skill of the cultivators. But 
 it is a melancholy thing to think that those men who can do so much with the 
 soil should be in any degree acting under a sort of traditional subserviency to the 
 owner of the soil, and neglecting or refusing to exercise freely the powers which 
 the constitution has placed in their hands. The fault is far more obvious and 
 jfar more grievous in England ; but as Scotch farmers have led the farmers 
 of the United Kingdom in a wise and successful cultivation of the soil, I know 
 not why they should not lead them in that emancipation from the political 
 .domination of their landlords, which, I am sure, before many years, will come, 
 not only in Scotland, but through every portion of the United Kingdom. Mr.
 
 38 
 
 Crawford has referred to the transactions of yesterday. I was present at the 
 great meeting and the great procession in Birmingham. I heard much of the 
 meeting in Manchester, and also of that -which was held last week In. the 
 West Hiding of Yorkshire. I am certain the transactions of yesterday do 
 not fall below in any degree those to which I have referred. I will not 
 Tenture uppn language of great eulogy upon what I saw, but for three hours 
 there passed before this window a procession of men. I think the 6maHest 
 and most moderate computation of their numbers, made with regard to the 
 speed hey passed, would bring the procession to a number exceeding 50,,000, 
 and probably reaching 60,000 men. Look at their demeanour, look at their 
 dress, look at the character stamped upon their countenances, look at the 
 variety of the industries which they represented, look at the feeling of prifle they 
 had in the noble labours in which their lives are spent. Take into consideration 
 all this, and say whether it be right, and whether it be safe for that is the 
 dogma of the Tory party perpetually to deny to these men those common 
 rights which belong to all the citizens of this country, upon the known and 
 admitted principles of the British constitution. Your motto is, " Let Glasgow 
 flourish !" But what would Glasgow be without the men who formed that pro- 
 cessioH ? And what would your country be, what would be the United Kingdom, 
 what would this empire be, if the men of their class could, by any sudden change, 
 be taken from amongst us ? The nation would dwindle into no nation at all, 
 and those men wha from their heights of power and wealth look down upon 
 the multitude whose business it is to labour and obey the law, and yet have 
 no share in making that law, those men would be at once dethroned from 
 being the apparent leaders of a great nation, and would themselves, incom- 
 petent as they are, have to descend to works of common labour, which they now 
 despise. There was one thing I was delighted to see yesterday. It was evident 
 in Birmingham as mufch as it was evident here, more evident in Birmingham 
 than it was in Manchester and in Leeds, : that there seemed to be a great union 
 of all classes in the proceedings. Employment for the time appeared to have 
 ceased, except that employment which was the business of the day. There 
 seemed to be I may be speaking from inadequate means of observation but 
 there felt to me throughout yesterday as if the men who lived in the great 
 houses around us had a sympathy in the purposes in which the great body of 
 the people were engaged. If that be so, it augurs well for the cause ; and I 
 think it desirable it should be known throughout every portion of the kingdom, 
 for I am satisfied that tb^e influence of yesterday's proceedings will not end with 
 yesterday ; it will not end with Glasgow and the west of Scotland, but it will be 
 felt in every portion of the United Kingdom. It is quite clear that this move- 
 ment in which we are engaged is beginning to be, and has already assumed the 
 proportions of a national movement. What was done in London three months 
 ago was as nothing to what can' be done in London now, when those who are 
 leading the movement undertake to set it in motion again. Birmingham was all 
 alive, and if there were any opposed they were in holes and corners, out of 
 sight ; but, in fact, in Birmingham there are very few to oppose, and 1 must say 
 when they do oppose, they do it with a moderation and an absence of rancour 
 that I have scarcely seen in any other part of the kingdom. In Manchester 
 there was a downpour of rain, as we say in Lancashire, from six o'clock in the
 
 30 
 
 morning to four o'clock in the afternoon, and f there had not been something 
 as robust in the politics as there is in the health and character of Lancashire 
 workiag tnsn, it would have been impossible to have had on 'ftiat day atyr gr^ftt 
 demonstration of onrubazs. In Yorkshire, those who saw the procession and 
 the m33tin * say there was .never anything like it in the \Vest Biding during the 
 memory of the oldest politician. If this natter his assumed a national cha- 
 racter, as I believe it has, miy we not hope that, before long, it may produce 
 some groat an.1 decisive result? I am going, I suppose now, within a fortnight 
 from this time, to pay a visit to some, I 'will say, like our chairman, too kind 
 friends of mine in the city of Dublin. I have been invited to attend a public 
 banquet and be the guest of certain persons who form a very favourable opinion 
 of my political career. Irish questions, no doubt, will be discussed more than 
 ffnestions, as we should say, clearly affecting the whole empire ; but I believe the 
 vvhole empire is deeply interested in what we commonly call " Irish questions." 
 I should like to tell the Irish people that there is no disposition on the part of the 
 people of Great Britain, whether of England or of Scotland, to do them injustice. 
 The injustice they have suffered has been from the governing classes in England, 
 and from the governing classes in Ireland. It has not been from the people of the 
 United Kingdom and the more speedily and the more entirely the nation of the 
 three kingdoms is admitted to its fair share in parliamentary power, the more 
 speedily and more completely will justice be done to Ireland, and justice also 
 be as fully done and secured to and for the whole people of the United King- 
 dom. I shall say no more but to tell you I have had singular pleasure in coming 
 to Glasgow on this occasion ; but I am, as you may suppose, always very much 
 happier the morning after a great meeting than I am the morning before it ; for 
 I feel, notwithstanding no little practice in public speaking, and no little fami- 
 liarity with the subjects to be discussed, a sense of a very heavy responsibility 
 which I cannot shake off. I have been placed, in connection with this question, 
 in a very prominent position, altogether unsought for by me. I have no anxiety 
 to -be a leader in politics, or to be lionised in great cities ; but from my youth 
 upwards I have had a horror and a hatred of that which is unjust to the people. 
 It was that feeling that led me to join one of whom I cannot speak without a 
 faltering voice in that great labour in which we worked so long together, the 
 abolition of the monopoly in food, and now if I am engaged more prominently 
 than some men may think I ought to be in this question, it is because I would 
 wisk to join my countrymen in striking down monopoly of a wider influence, and 
 which, when it is gone, ten or twenty years afterwards, all thoughtful and good 
 men hi the country will rejoice at as much as they now rejoice that the monopoly, 
 the stupid and ignorant monopoly, of the landowners no longer limits the supply 
 of food to a great people.
 
 40 
 
 SPEECHES AT DUBLIN. 
 
 ON tlio 30th of October Mr. Bright was entertained at a Banquet 
 in the Rotunda, Dublin, and on rising to respond to the toast of 
 his health, the hon. gentleman was greeted with enthusiastic cheers, 
 which continued for a considerable time, the entire company 
 standing, and the ladies in the gallery waving their handkerchiefs. 
 When silence was restored, Mr. Bright said : 
 
 Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, I feel myself more embarrassed than 
 I can well describe, at the difficult but still honourable position in which 
 I find myself to-night. I am profoundly moved by the exceeding and 
 generous kindness with which you have received me, and all I can do is 
 to thank you for it, and to say how grateful to my heart it is that such a 
 number as I see before me I will say of my countrymen have approved 
 generally of the political course which I have pursued. But I may assure you 
 that the difficulty of this position is not at all of my seeking. I heard during 
 the last session of Parliament that if I was likely to come to Ireland during 
 the autumn, it was not improbable that I should be asked to some banquet of 
 this kind in this city. I had an intention of coming, but being moved by this 
 kindness or menace, I changed my mind, and spent some weeks in Scotland 
 instead of Ireland. When I found from the newspapers that an invitation was 
 being signed, asking me to come here, I wrote to my honourable friend, Sir John 
 Gray, to ask him if he would be kind enough to put an extinguisher upon the 
 project, inasmuch as I was not intending to cross the Channel. He said that 
 the matter had proceeded so far that it was impossible to interfere with it that 
 it must take its natural course, and the result was that I received an invitation 
 signed, I think, by about 140 names, amongst whom there were not less, I 
 believe, than twenty-two members of the House of Commons. Well, as you 
 will probably imagine, I felt that this invitation was of that nature 
 that, although it was most difficult to accede to it, it was impossible to 
 refuse it, and that accounts for my being here to-night, and is a simple 
 explanation of what has taken place. I said amongst the signatures were the 
 names of not less than 22 members of the House of Commons. I speak with 
 grief when I say that one of our friends who signed that invitation is no 
 longer with us. I had not the pleasure of a long acquaintance with Mr. 
 Dillon, but I shall take this opportunity of saying that during the last 
 session of Parliament I formed a very high opinion of his character. There 
 was that in his eye and in the tone of his voice in his manner altogether, 
 which marked him for an honourable and a just man. I venture to say that 
 his sad and sudden removal is a great loss to Ireland. I believe amongst all 
 her worthy ' sons, Ireland has had no worthier and no nobler son than 
 John Blake Dillon. I shall not be wrong if I assume that the ground 
 of my visit to Dublin is to be found first in the sympathy which I have 
 always felt and expressed for the condition, and for the wrongs, and for the 
 rights of the people of Ireland, and probably also because I am supposed, in
 
 41 
 
 sonic degree, to represent some amount of the opinion in England, which is 
 also favourable to the true interests of this island. The Irish question is a 
 question that has often been discussed, and yet it remains at this day as 
 much a question as it has been for centuries past. The Parliament of Kil- 
 kenny, a Parliament that sat a very long time ago, if indeed it was 
 a Parliament at all it was a Parliament that sat about 500 years ago, that 
 I believe proposed to inflict a very heavy penalty if any Irishman's horse 
 was found grazing on any Englishman's land, and it was a Parliament which 
 left on record a question, which it may be worth our while to consider to- 
 night it put to the King this question, "How comes it to pass that the 
 King was never the richer for Ireland?" We, 500 years afterwards, 
 venture to ask this question, ' ' Why is it that the Queen, or the Crown, or 
 the United Kingdom, or the Empire, is never the richer for Ireland," and 
 if you will permit me I will try to give you as clearly as I can something 
 like an answer to that very old question. What it may be followed by is 
 this, How is it that we, the Imperial Parliament, cannot act so as to bring 
 about in Ireland contentment and tranquillity, and a solid union between 
 Ireland and Great Britain ? and that means further, how can we improve 
 the condition and change the minds of the people of Ireland ? Some say, I 
 have heard many who say it in England, and I am afraid there are 
 Irishmen also who would say it, that there is some radical defect in 
 the Irish character which prevents the condition of Ireland being so 
 satisfactory as is the condition of England and of Scotland. 
 Now, I am inclined to believe that whatever there is that is 
 defective in any portion of the Irish people comes not from their race, but 
 from their history, and the conditions to which they have been subjected. 
 I am told by those in authority that in Ireland there is a remarkable 
 absence of crime. I have heard since I came to Dublin, from those well 
 acquainted with the facts, that there is probably no great city in the 
 world in the civilised and Christian world of equal population with the 
 city in which we are now assembled, where there is so little crime 
 committed. And I find that that portion of the Irish people which has 
 found a home in the United States has in the period of sixteen years 
 between 1848 and ] 8C4 remitted about 13,000,000 sterling to their 
 friends and relatives in Ireland. I am bound to place these facts in 
 opposition to any statements that I hear as to any radical defects of the 
 Irish character. I say that it would be much more probable that the 
 defect lies in the Government and in the law. But there are some others 
 who say that the great misfortune of Ireland is in the existence of the 
 noxious race of political agitators. Well, as to that I may state, that 
 the most distinguished political agitators that have appeared during the 
 last 100 years in Ireland are Grattan and O'Connell, and I should say that 
 lie must be either a very stupid or a very base Irishman who would wish 
 to erase the achievements of Grattan and O'Connell from the annals of his 
 country. But some say (and this is not an uncommon thing) some say 
 that the priests of the popular church in Ireland have been the cause of 
 much discontent. I believe there is no class of men in Ireland who have a 
 deeper interest in a prosperous and numerous community than the priests
 
 42 
 
 of the Catholic Church ; and further, I believe that no men have suffered 
 more have suffered more I mean, in mind and in feeling, from witnessing 
 the miseries and the desolation which during the last century (to go no 
 further back) have stricken and afflicted the Irish people. But some others 
 say that there is no ground of complaint, because the laws and institutions of 
 Ireland are, in the main, the same as the laws and institutfons of England 
 and Scotland. They say, for example, that if there be an Established 
 Church in Ireland there is one in England and one in Scotland, and thr.t 
 Nonconformists are very numerous both in England and in Scot- 
 land ; but they seem to forget this fact, that the Church in Eng- 
 land or the Church in Scotland is not in any sense a foreign church 
 that it has not been imposed in past times, and. is not maintained 
 now by force that it is not in any degree the symbol of con- 
 quest, that it is not the church of a small minority, absorbing the 
 ecclesiastical revenues and endowments of a whole kingdom; and 
 they omit to remember or to acknowledge that if any Government 
 attempted to plant by force the Episcopal Church in Scotland or the 
 Catholic Church in England, the disorders and discontent which have pre- 
 vailed in Ireland would be witnessed with tenfold intensity and violence in 
 Great Britain. And these persons whom I am describing also say that the 
 land laws in Ireland are the same as the land laws in England. It would 
 be easy to show that the land laws in England are bad enough, and that 
 but for the outlet of the population, afforded by our extraordinary manufac- 
 turing industry, the condition of England would in all probability become 
 quite as bad as the condition of Ireland has been; but if the countries differ 
 with regard to land and the management of it in their customs, may it not be 
 reasonable that they should also differ in their laws ? In Ireland the land- 
 owner is the creature of conquest, not of conquest of 800 years ago, but of 
 conquest completed only 2(^0 years ago ; and it may be well for us to 
 remember, and for all Englishmen to remember, that succeeding that transfer 
 of the land to the new comers from Great Britain, there followed a system 
 of law, known by the name of the penal code, of the most ingenious 
 cruelty, and such as, I believe, has never in modern times been inflicted on 
 any Christian people. Unhappily, on this account, the wound which was 
 opened by the conquest has never been permitted to be closed, and thus we 
 have had landowners in Ireland of a different race, of a different religion, 
 and of different ideas from the great bulk of the people, and there has been 
 a constant and bitter war between the owners and occupiers of the spil. 
 Now, up to this point I suppose that even the gentlemen who were dining 
 together the other evening in Belfast would probably agree with me, 
 because what I have stated is mere matter of notorious history to be found 
 in every book which has treated of the course of Irish affairs during the 
 last two hundred years. But I think they would agree with me even further 
 than this. They would say that Ireland is a land which has been torn by 
 religious factions, and torn by these factions at least in the North as much 
 as in the South; and I think they would be doing less than justice to the 
 iAabitants of the North if they said that they had in any degree come 
 short of the people of the South in the intensity of their passionate
 
 43 
 
 feelings with regard to their church; Bwt Ireland has been more than this 
 it has been a land of evictions a word which, I suspect, is scarcely known 
 in any other civilised country. It is a country from which thousands of 
 families have been driven by the will of the landowners and the power of 
 the law. It is a country where have existed, to a great extent, those dread 
 tribunals known by the common name of secret societies, by which, in 
 the pursuit of what some men have thought to be justice, thera have been 
 committed crimes of appalling guilt in the eye of the whole world. It is a 
 country, too, in which, and it is the only Christian country of which it may 
 be said for some centuries past it is a country in which a famine of tho 
 most desolating character has prevailed even during our own time. I think 
 I was told in 1849, as I stood in the burial ground at Skibbereen, that at 
 least 400 people who had died of famine were buried within the quarter of 
 an acre of ground on which I was then looking. It is a country, too, from 
 Which there has been a greater emigration by sea within a given time than 
 has been known at any time from any other country in the world. It is a 
 country where there has been, for generations past, a general sense off wrong, 
 out of which has grown a state of chronic insurrection ; and at this very 
 moment when I speak, the general safeguard of constitutional liberty is 
 withdrawn, and we meet in this hall, and I spsak here to-night, rather by 
 the forbearance and permission of the Irish executive than under the pro- 
 tection of the common safeguards of the rights and liberties of the people of 
 the United Kingdom. I venture to say that this is a miserable and 
 a humiliating picture to draw of this country. Bear in mind that I am not 
 speaking of Poland suffering under the conquest of Russia. There is a 
 gentleman now a candidate for an Irish county, who is very great upon the 
 wrongs of Poland ; but I have found him always in the House of Commons 
 taking sides with that great party which has systematically supported the 
 wrongs of Ireland. I am not speaking about Hungary, 'or of Venice as she was 
 under the rule of Austria, or of the Greeks under the dominion of the Turk, 
 but I am speaking of Ireland part of the United Kingdom part of that 
 which boasts itself to be the most civilised and the most Christian nation in 
 the world. I took the liberty recently, at a meeting in Glasgow, to say 
 that I believed it was impossible for a class to govern a great nation wisely 
 and justly. Now, in Ireland there has been a field in which all the principles 
 of the Tory party have had their complete experiment and development. 
 You have had the country gentleinan|in all his power. You have had any 
 number of acts 6*f Parliament which the ancient Parliament of Ireland, or 
 the Parliament of the UnitedJKingdom could give him. You have had the 
 Established Church supported|by the law, even to the extent, not many 
 years ago, of collecting its revenues by the aid of military force. In point 
 of fact, I believe it would be impossible^to imagine a state of things in which 
 the principles of the Tory party have had a more entire and complete 
 opportunity for their trial than,they have'had within the limits of this island. 
 And yet what has happened ? % This, surely. That the kingdom has been 
 continually weakened that the|harmony of the empire has been disturbed, 
 and that the mischief has not been[confined to the United Kingdom, but has 
 spread to the colonies. And at thisjmoment, as we know by every arrival
 
 4i 
 
 from the United States, the colony of Canada is exposed to danger of 
 invasion that it is forced to keep on foot soldiers which it otherwise 
 would not want, and to involve itself in expenses which threaten to be 
 ruinous to its financial condition, and all that it may defend itself from 
 Irishmen hostile to England, who are settled in the United States. In fact, 
 the Government of Lord Derby at this moment is doing exactly that which 
 the Government of Lord North did nearly a hundred years ago it is sending 
 out troops across the Atlantic to fight Irishmen who are the bitter enemies 
 of England on the American continent. Now, I believe every gentleman 
 in this room will admit that all that I have said is literally true. And if 
 it be true, what conclusion are we to come to ? Is it that the law is bad 
 which rules in Ireland and the people good, or that the law is good and the 
 people bad ? Now, let us, if we can, get rid for a moment of Episcopali- 
 anism, Presbyterianism, Protestantism, and Orangeism on the one hand, 
 and of Catholicism, Eomanism, Ultramontanism on the other, let us for a 
 moment get beyond all these "isms," and try if we can discover what it is 
 that is the matter with your country. I shall ask you only to turn your 
 eye upon two points the first is the Established Church, and the second is 
 the tenure of land. The church may be said to affect the soul and. sentiment 
 of the country, and the land question may be said to affect the means of 
 of life and the comforts of the people. Now, I shall not blame the bishops 
 and clergy of the Established Church. There may be, and I doubt not 
 there are, amongst them many pious and devoted men, who labour to the 
 utmost of their power to do good in the district which is committed to their 
 care ; but I venture to say this, that if they were all good and all pious, it 
 would not in a national point of view compensate for this one fatal error 
 the error of their existence as the ministers of an Established Protestant 
 Church in Ireland. Every man of them is necessarily in his district a 
 symbol of the supremacy of the few and of the subjection of the many ; and 
 although the amount of the revenue of the Established Church as the sum 
 payable by the whole nation may not be considerable, yet bear in mind that 
 it is often the galling of the chain which is more tormenting than the weight 
 of it. I believe that the removal of the Established Church would create a 
 new political and social atmosphere in Ireland that it would make the 
 people feel that old things had passed away that all things had become 
 ue w that an Irishman and his faith were no longer'to be condemned in his 
 own country and that for the first time the English people and the English 
 Parliament intended to do full justice to Ireland. Now, leaving the 
 Established Church, I come to the question of the land. I have said that 
 the ownership of the land in Ireland came originally from conquest and 
 from confiscation, and, as a matter of course, there was created a great gulf 
 between the owner and the occupier, and from that time to this doubtless 
 there has been wanting that sympathy which exists to a large extent 
 in Great Britain, and that ought to exist in every country. I am told 
 you can answer it if I am wrong that it is not common in Ireland now to 
 gives leases to tenants, especially to Catholic tenants. If that be so, then 
 the security for the property of the tenant rests only upon the good feeling 
 and favour of the owner of the land, for the laws, as we know, have been
 
 made by the landowners, and many propositions for the advantage of the 
 tenants have unfortunately been too little considered by Parliament. The 
 result is that you have bad farming, bad dwelling-houses, bad temper, and 
 everything bad connected with the occupation and cultivation of land in 
 Ireland. One of the results a result the most appalling is this, that 
 your population are fleeing from your country and seeking a refuge in a 
 distant land. On this point I wish to refer to a letter which I received a, 
 few days ago from a most esteemed citizen of Dublin. He told me that he 
 believed that a very large portion of what he called the poor, amongst 
 Irishmen, sympathised with any scheme or any proposition that was 
 adverse to the Imperial Government. He said further, that the people here 
 are rather in the country than of it, and that they are looking more to 
 America than they are looking to England. I think there is a good deal 
 in that. When we consider how many Irishmen have found a refuge in 
 America, I do not know how we can wonder at that statement. You will 
 recollect that when the ancient Hebrew prophet prayed in his captivity he 
 prayed with his window opened towards Jerusalem. You know that the 
 followers of Mahommed, when they pray, turn their faces towards Mecca. 
 When the Irish peasant asks for food, and freedom, and blessing, his eye 
 follows the setting sun ; the aspirations of his heart reach beyond the wide 
 Atlantic and in spirit he grasps hands with the great Republic of the 
 West. If this be so, I say, then, that the disease is not only serious, but 
 it is even desperate ; but desperate as it is, I believe there is a certain 
 remedy for it, if the people iand the Parliament of the United Kingdom 
 are willing to apply it. Now, if it were possible, would it not be worth 
 while to change the sentiments and improve the condition of tho Irish 
 cultivators of the soil ? If we were to remove the Stats Church there would 
 still be a church, but it would not be a supremacy church. The Catholics 
 of Ireland have no idea of saying that Protestantism in its various forma 
 shall not exist in their island. There would still be a church, but it would 
 be a free church of a section of a free people. I will not go into details 
 about the change. Doubtless every mail would say that the present 
 occupants of the livings should, during their lifetime, not be disturbed ; 
 but if the principle of the abolition of the State Church were once 
 fixed and accepted, it would not be difficult to arrange the details 
 that would be satisfactory to the people of Ireland. Now, who 
 objects to this ? The men who are in favour of supremacy, and the 
 men who have a fanatical hatred of what they call Popery. To honest and 
 good men 01 the Protestant Church and of the Protestant faith there is no 
 reason whatever to fear this change. What has the voluntary system done 
 in Scotland ? What has it done amongst the Nonconformists of England ? 
 W hat has it done amongst the population of Wales ? and what has it done 
 amongst the Catholic population of your own Ireland ? In my opinion 
 the abolition of the Established Church would give Protestantism itself 
 another chance. I believe there has been in Ireland no other enemy ot 
 Protestantism so injurious as the Protestant State Establishment. It has 
 been loaded for 200 years with the sins of bad government and bad laws, 
 and whatever may have been the beauty and the holiness of its doctrine or
 
 46 
 
 of its professors, it has not been able to hold its ground, loaded as it has 
 been by the sins of a bad government. One effect of the Established Church 
 has been this, the making Catholicism in Ireland not only a faith but a 
 patriotism, for it was not likely that any member of the Catholic Church 
 would incline in the slightest degree to Protestantism so long as it presented 
 itself to his eyes as a wrong doer and full of injustice in connection with the 
 . t of his country. But now, if honest Protestantism has nothing 
 to fear from the change that I would recommend, what has the honest 
 jwner to fear ? The history of Europe and America for the last one 
 hundred years r.ifords scarcely any picture more painful than that which i.s 
 led by the landowners of this kingdom. The Irish landowner has been 
 different from every other landowner, for the bulk of his land has only been 
 about half cultivated, 'and he has had to collect his rents by a process 
 approaching the evils of civil war. His property has been very insecure 
 the sale of it sometimes has been rendered impossible. The landowner 
 hiinsslf has often been hated by those who ought to have loved him. He 
 oen banished from his ancestral home by terror, and not a few have 
 lost their lives without the sympathy of those who ought to hr.ve been their 
 protectors and their friends. I would like to ask, what can be much 
 worse than this ? If in this country 50 years ago, as in Prussia, there had 
 arisen statesmen who would have taken one-third or one-half the land from 
 the landowners of Ireland, and made it over to their tenants, I believe that 
 the Irish landowner, great as would have been the injustice of which he 
 ruielit have complained, would in all probability have been richer and 
 hapuier than he has been. Now, what is the first remedy which you would 
 propose ? Clearly this that which is the most easily applicable and which 
 would most speedily touch the condition of the country. It is this that 
 the property which the tenant shall invest or create in hio farm shall be 
 secured to the tenant by law. I believe that if Parliament were fairly to 
 enact this it would make a change in the whole temper of the country. I 
 recollect in the year 1849 being down in the county of "VVesford. I 
 called at the house of an old farmer of the name of Stafford, who 
 lived in a very good house, the best farmhouse, I think, that I had 
 seen since leaving Dublin. Ke lived on his own farm, which he had 
 bought fifteen years before. The house was a house which he had himself 
 built. He was a venerable old man, and we had some very interesting con- 
 versation with him. I asked how it was he had so good a house ? Ke sak- 
 the farm was his own, and the house was his own, and, as no man 
 could disturb him, he had made it a much better house than was common for 
 the farmers of Ireland. I said to him, "If all the farmers of Ireland had the 
 same security for the capital they laid out on their farms, what would be the 
 the result ? " The old man almost sprang out of his chair, and said " Sir, 
 if you will give us that encouragement, we will bate the hunger out of 
 Ireland." It is said that all this must be left to contract between the 
 landlord and the tenant ; but the public, which may be neither landlord 
 nor tenant, has a great interest in this question ; and I maintain that the 
 interests of the public require that Parliament should secure to the tenant the 
 property which he has invested in his farm. But I would not stop here.
 
 47 
 
 There is another, accl what I should call a more permanent and far-reaching 
 remedy for the evils of Ireland, and those persons who stickle so much for 
 political economy I hope will follow me in this. The great evil of Ireland 
 I j this that the Irish people the Irish nation are dispossessed of the 
 soil, and what we ought to do is to provide for, and aid in, their restoration 
 to it by all mersures of justice. "Why should we tolerate in Ireland the 
 law of primogeniture ? Why should we tolerate the system of entails ? Why 
 should the object of the law be to accumulate land in great masses in few 
 hands, and to make it almost impossible for persons of small means, and 
 tenant farmers, to become possessors of land ? If you go to other countries 
 for example, to Norway, to Denmark, to Holland, to Belgium, to France, 
 to Germany, to Italy, or to the United States, you will find that in all these 
 Countries those laws of which I complain have been abolished, and the land 
 : j just as free to buy and sell, and hold and cultivate, as any other descrip- 
 tion of property in the kingdom. No doubt your Landed Estates Court and 
 your Record of Titles Act were good measures, but they were good because 
 they were in the direction that I want to travel further in. But I would 
 go further than that ; I would deal with the question of absenteeism. I 
 am not going to propose to tax absentees ; but if iny advice were taken, we 
 should have a Parliamentary commission empowered to buy up the large 
 3 in Ireland belonging to the English nobility, for the purpose of 
 ig them on easy terms to the occupiers of the farms and to the 
 :'oy of Ireland. Now, let me be fairly understood. I am not pro- 
 y to tax absentees ; I am not proposing to take any of their property 
 them ; but I propose this, that a Parliamentary commission should be 
 empowered to treat for the purchase of those large estates with the view of 
 ;; them to the tenantry of Ireland. Now, here are some of them the 
 present Prime Minister Lord Derby, Lord Lansdowne, Lord Fitzwilliam, 
 Larquis of Hertford, the Marquis of Bath, the Duke of Bedford, the 
 Duiie of Devonshire, and many others. They have estates in Ireland ; 
 many of them, I dare say, are just as well managed as any estates in 
 the country ; but what you want is to restore to Ireland a middle- 
 class proprietary of the soil ; and I venture to say that if these estates 
 could be purchased and could be sold out farm by farm to the tenant 
 occupiers in Ireland, that it would be infinitely better in a conservative sense, 
 that they should belong to great proprietors living out of the country. 
 I have said that the disease is desperate, and that the remedy must be 
 king. I assert that the present system of Government with regard to 
 the church and with regard to the land has failed disastrously in Ireland. 
 Under it Ireland has become an object of commiseration to the whole 
 world and a discredit to the United Kingdom, of which it forms a part. 
 It is a land of many sorrows. Men fight for supremacy, and call it Pro- 
 testantism ; they fight for evil and bad laws, and they call it acting for the 
 defence of property. Now, are there no good men in Ireland of those who 
 are generally opposed to us in politics are there none who can rise above 
 the level of party ? If there be such, 1 wish my voice might reach them. 
 I have often asked myself whether patriotism is dead in Ireland ? Cannot 
 all the people of Ireland see that the calamities of their country are the
 
 creatures of the law, and if that be so, just lawi can only remove these 
 calamities. Xow, if Irishmen were united if your 105 members were for 
 the most part agreed, you might do almost anything that you liked you 
 might do it even in the present Parliament ; but if you are disunited, then 
 I know not how you can gain anything from a Parliament created 
 as the Imperial Parliament is now. The class that rules in Britain 
 will hear your cry as it has heard it before, and will pay no attention to- 
 it. They will see your people leaving your shores, and they will think it 
 no calamity to the country. They know that they have force to suppress- 
 insurrection, and, therefore, you can gain nothing from, their fears. What, 
 then, is your hope ? It is in a better Parliament, representing fairly the 
 United Kingdom the movement which is now in force in England and 
 Scotland, and which is your movement as much as ours. If there wera 
 109 more members, the representatives of large and free constituencies, then 
 your cry would be heard, and the people would give you that justice which 
 a class has so long denied you. The great party that is now in power the 
 Tory party denies that you have any just cause of complaint. In a speech 
 delivered the other day in Belfast, much was said of the enforcement of the 
 law ; but there was nothing said about any change or amendment in the 
 law. With this party terror is their only speciiic, and they have no con- 
 fidence in allegiance except where there is no power to rebel. Now, I differ 
 from these men entirely. I believe that at the root of a general discontent 
 there is in all countries a general grievance and general suffering. The sur- 
 face of society is not incessantly disturbed without a cause. I recollect in 
 the poem, of the greatest of Italian poets, he tells us that as he saw in vision 
 the Stygian lake, and stood upon its banks, he observed the constant com- 
 motion upon the surface of the pool, and his good instructor and guide 
 explained to him the cause of it 
 
 " This, too, for certain know, that underneath 
 Ths water d~ells a multitude, whose sigh.-; 
 Into these bubbles make the surface heave, 
 As thine eye tells thee wheresoe'er it turn." 
 
 And I say in Ireland for generations back, that the misery and the v.Tong,? 
 of the people have made then- sign, and have found a voice in constant 
 insurrection and disorder. I have said that Ireland is a country of many 
 wrongs and of many sorrows. Her past lies almost all in shadow. Her 
 present is full of anxiety and peril. Her future depends on the power of 
 her people to substitute equality and justice for supremacy, and a generous 
 patriotism for the spirit of faction. In the effort now making in Great 
 Britain to create a free representation of the people you have the deepest 
 interest. The people never wish to suffer, and they never wish to inflict 
 injustice. They have no sympathy with the wrongdoer, whether in Great 
 Britain or in Ireland ; and when they are fairly represented in the 
 Imperial Parliament, as I hope they will one day be, they will speedily give 
 an effective and final answer to that old question of the Parliament of 
 Kilkenny " How comes it to pass that the King has never been the richer 
 for Ireland." (The honourable gentleman resumed his seat amid the most 
 enthusiastic demonstrations of applause. )
 
 49 
 
 0x the following day (Wednesday) Mr. Bright received a deputation 
 fi m om the Cork Farmers' Club, by whom he was presented with an 
 address thanking him for his services to Ireland and for his efforts 
 to improve the condition of the occupiers of the land. In acknow- 
 ledging the address, Mr. Bright said : 
 
 I am in a much greater difficulty than I should be if I had 3,000 or 
 4, 000 people to speak to on an occasion of this kind. I observe in the 
 second paragraph of the address which you have kindly brought, that you 
 refer to supposed services which I have rendered to the cause of humanity 
 .-nil freedom. The fact is, I feel what I suppose everybody feels who is 
 honestly engaged in public life that after a good deal of work, of many 
 years of labour, very little has been done, for the world seems to move on 
 very slowly, and what any man can do to make it move appears to be very 
 little. But I have always had the opinion that a people are very much 
 what their laws make them. I entirely disbelieve those theories which 
 assume that it does not matter very much what kind of laws you have 
 that, after all, everything depends on a man's self. A great deal depends 
 on a man's self, but a great deal depends on the laws; and I think, if we 
 trace history back and look over the countries we know something of, we 
 shall find that the people are in the main what their laws and institutions 
 make them. Now, my mind, from a very young age, has led me always to 
 a feeling that laws should be equal and should be just; that all the people 
 living in a country have an equal right to be considered and well treated by 
 the institutions and laws under which they live. In this country, 
 uorc perhaps than in almost any other country in Europe, that has not 
 "been the principle on which the government has been conducted, because it 
 is quite clear that the laws have been made until recently by a party, or 
 rather for the supremacy of a party more than for the whole people; and as 
 regards the land, which is the question to which you particularly refer, 
 there can be no kind of doubt of this, that the laws have been absolutely 
 the product of the selfishness and ignorance of the landed proprietors, and 
 l>y no means the product of the general intelligence of all classes in this 
 country. It is the same to a great extent in England, where, as Mr. 
 Murphy knows perfectly well, in the House of Commons there are questions 
 which you can discuss with an expectation that they will be fairly consi- 
 dered; but if you come to any question connected with the land, with the 
 supremacy of that particular property in the country, argument is of no 
 avail whatever, and the slightest tendency to what I would call intelligence 
 suii justice with regard to that is met by the most determined opposition 
 }>y the great landowning classes in the House. Of course, there are many 
 admirable exceptions there, as there are here; but, on the whole, the great 
 weight of that party and class is directed against any wise change in regard 
 to tli.} laws affecting property in land. Now, twenty years ago, they 
 we were going to ruin, them when we were proposing to allow 
 f i'co of duty; and I believe there were 
 
 D
 
 50 
 
 many of them who did absolutely believe that their estates would be 
 of no value, and that, as far as landowning went in Great Britain and 
 Ireland, the world was about coming to an end. They find, now, they 
 have got rid of all the odium of that system, and at the same time they 
 have not got rid of their land, but their land is of more value than it was 
 before. Certainly in England farmers are in a more satisfactory position 
 than they were before. The whole tone of society in England is wonder- 
 fully improved by the change which took place in 184C. I believe that, if 
 in England and in Ireland the laws of political economy were applied to 
 land, we should find just as great a change from this point forward with 
 regard to matters which are influenced by laws affecting laud, as we have 
 found in past tunes by the abolition of the laws which prevented the impor- 
 tation of corn. I remember my lamented friend, Mr. Cobden, who was not 
 likely to undervalue the effect of free trade in corn, saying, on more tlir.n 
 one occasion, that the men who hereafter would entirely free the land 
 place the laws with regard to land on a just and satisfactory footing would 
 at least confer as great a benefit upon the people as he and those of tliat 
 former agitation had been able to confer, by the success of our movement. 
 He was no mean judge of such a matter, and his opinion is worth taking 
 note of, for he was not a man of violent party feeling at all, but judged tV. 
 question, perhaps, with a dispassionateness and intelligence which 
 nsver been exceeded by any public man among&t us. Now, there is this 
 difficulty in discussing the whole Irish question. The great Church party 
 is the Tory party. The boundaries which mark out the limits of tlio 
 Established Church are almost the boundaries which mark out the limit ; ol 
 tha Tory party. They think that if the Irish Church were got rid of if 
 the voluntary principle were established as the universal practice in Ireland 
 that principle would by-and-by cross the Channel, and raise an equal 
 contest to be settled in like manner in Great Britain; and although if you 
 were at the Antipodes (I am speaking of the church as a political institu- 
 tion) you might sweep it off the face of the earth and there would be no 
 tears shed in the House of Commons; yet being so near home, they have no 
 doubt a great dread that the same thing would be asked for and done here- 
 after in England. And so with regard to land in a degree not less obvious. 
 They think that the concession of any measure of tenant right or security 
 for a tenant for his improvements, would be followed by a coercive move- 
 ment on the part of the tenants in England and Scotland ; and in England 
 and Scotland the tenantry are so powerful, that if they once put their 
 heads in one direction there is no possibility of withstanding them. 
 They are much more powerful than the tenants are here, because you, acting 
 alone, have to act upon a great and powerful body in London. If you had 
 a parliament in College Green, clearly the tenantry of Ireland, with the 
 present feeling in Ireland, would be able to force that parliament to any 
 measure of justice they desired ; but as you have to deal with a great parlia- 
 ment sitting at London, all the clamour you make, the demands you may 
 urge from this side of the Channel, come with a very feeble effect in London, 
 especially as it can only be represented by about one hundred members, and 
 of those it unfortunately happens that a considerable number are not wil
 
 51 
 
 to support the demands that are made. But if, in England the tenantry, 
 and in Scotland the tenant farmers the most capable and most intelligent 
 agriculturists perhaps in the world if they were to join in favour of 
 measures, such as measures hostile to the game laws, hostile to any injustice 
 which is supposed to exist with regard to the improvement of the tenants, 
 it would be quite impossible for the Parliament to resist their demands. 
 You see, therefore, the great difficulty you have to contend with. You 
 have to wrest your rights from a Parliament sitting in London, to which you 
 send 105 members. Perhaps half are not in favour of yoxir rights, and, 
 therefore, the 50 who are so are lost in the 600 they find there, and the 
 effort on the part of your members to do anything is one 'of the most dis- 
 heartening things that any representative of the people can have to do. I 
 have, since I have been in Parliament, which is now 23 years, heard a 
 hundred times, nay, much oftener, blame attached to the Irish members for 
 the little they do there. I believe that at this moment the Irish Liberal 
 members are the most respectable, and the most respected and influential of 
 all the Irish Liberal members that have sat in Parliament for the last 2.'J 
 years. That is my opinion. I think it is admitted in the House of Commons, 
 universally, that the Irish Liberal members of this Parliament are not 
 inferior, but are superior to the Irish Liberal members that sat in former 
 Parliaments during the last 25 years ; but, notwithstanding that, and although 
 I think they have a corresponding increase of influence, yet it is one of the 
 most difficult things in the world for fifty men, acting amongst 600 men, 
 some hundreds of miles from those whom they represent, to work up any 
 question which may be against the prejudices and sympathies of the 600 
 amongst whom they are acting, and, therefore, Irish constituencies, whilst 
 they should make no allowance in favour of those members who are not 
 honest towards them and do not do their duty, yet for those who are honest 
 and do their duty, they should make allowance. They have difficulties in 
 the Parliament in London which are vastly greater than the difficulties of an 
 English member, or than those the Irish members would find if their 
 Parliament was sitting in this country. Now, what can be done with regard 
 to this question ? I say I don't know that I can do much. 1 have always 
 given what support I could to any proposition that appeared to me reason- 
 able and right on this question in Parliament. During the last session we had 
 the great advantage of the assistance of a most eminent man, the member for 
 Westminster, Mr. J. Stuart Mill. He made an admirable speech in favour of 
 tenant improvement, and a speech which I have no doubt had a considerable 
 effect on the House ; but I trust more to two things than to any others in 
 regard to this question. The first is the necessities of party if this Govern- 
 ment goes out, which is not a thing impossible, and is a thing, 
 probably to be desired. Another Government coming in will no 
 doubt be under a distinct pledge to endeavour to settle this land question 
 upon some sensible and just arrangement, and from that something may be 
 gained ; but I believe what we have most to rely upon is the hope that 
 before long we shall have a better representation. There is nothing in the 
 world more certain than this, that if you call a meeting in any part of Great 
 Britain where you have got a fair average of middle class people or working
 
 52 
 
 class people, and you will state to tlic:n in such a manner as I have been 
 accustomed to state with any degree of conciseness and fairness what you 
 want in this respect, I believe you will not find a sensible .man to dissent 
 from the proposition that these questions are questions of great importance, 
 and ought to be entertained and adjusted by the Government and Par- 
 liament. And, therefore, if the time should come and I hope it is not far 
 distant, that the people are let in and that Parliament is more popular, if 
 you like, more democratic, the complaints made from this side of the 
 Channel will be listened to there with more attention, and your 100 members, 
 or so many of them as may be in favour of justice to Ireland, will find an 
 increased and increasing power there to sympathise with them, and bring 
 these questions to some wise and just arrangement. I don't know that I 
 have any more to say. I am very sensible of your kindness, and it appears 
 to me almost unreasonable that any of the citizens of Cork should come so 
 far on this occasion and address me in the manner you have done. The 
 Irish question has been to me one of great interest from my earliest con- 
 nection with public life. I knew Mr. O'Connell with a certain intimacy, 
 and when I was a very young member of the House of Commons, I often, if 
 I found an opportunity, sat by him, for I found his conversation not only 
 very amusing but very instructive. He knew everybody, and almost every- 
 thing, and his comments on all that passed were very pleasant to listen to, 
 fnd often very informing. I don't know how whether it is from a natural 
 love of what is just or not but I always had a great sympathy with the 
 Irish people and Irish questions, and as long as I remain in Parliament, of 
 in public life, or in life at all, and am capable of thinking, I believe I shall 
 be of opinion that we in this generation do owe it to ourselves, and owe it 
 to Ireland, to make such amends as we can for an amount of neglect, and 
 cruelty, and injustice committed in the past, such as I think no civilised or 
 Christian nation, has ever inflicted on another Christian nation. I thank you 
 most sincerely for your great kindness to me, and I hope you may rely upon 
 it that whatever I have done from that sympathy in past times, I shall not 
 withhold in the future. Only you must not exaggerate what I can' do or 
 what anybody else can do ; but if you get your members to unite cordially 
 with the really Liberal party which is every day growing in England, I 
 hope by and by you will have gained something. If we regret the dark- 
 ness of the past of Ireland, we may do something to make us hope for a 
 brighter and pleasantcr prospect for the future.
 
 ON the 2nd of November Mr. Bright attended a meeting of the 
 Working Men of Dublin, in the Theatre of the Mechanics' Institution, 
 James Haughton, Esq., in the Chair. An address of welcome to 
 Mr. Bright was presented to him, amid loud and general cheering. 
 The address expressed the thanks of the working men of Ireland to 
 Mr. Bright, and stated that the Irish people had no hope of relie 
 from an English House of Commons as at present constituted. 
 Mr. Bright, in acknowledging the address, said : 
 
 When I came to your city I was asked if I would attend a public meet- 
 ing on the question of Parliamentary Ref orm. I answered that I was not in 
 good order for much speaking, for I have suffered, as I am afraid you will 
 find before I come to the end of my speech, from much cold and hoarseness, 
 but it was urged upon me that there were at least some, and not an inconsider- 
 able number, of the working men of this city who would be glad -f I would 
 meet them ; and it was proposed to offer to me some address of friendship 
 and confidence such as that which has been read. I have no complaint to 
 make of it, but this, that whilst I do not say it indicates too much kindness, 
 yet that it colours too highly the small services which I have been able to 
 render to any portion of my countrymen. Your countrymen are reckoned 
 generally to be a people of great gratitude and of much enthusiasm, and, 
 therefore, I accept the address with all the kindness and feelings of friend- 
 ship with which it has been offered, and I hope it will be, at least in some 
 degree, a stimulant to me, in whatever position in life I am placed, to 
 remember, as I have ever in past times remembered, the claims of the peogle 
 of this island to complete equal justice with all portions of the people of the 
 United Kingdom. Now, there may be persons in this room, I should be 
 surprised if there were not, who doubt whether it is worth their while even 
 to hope for substantial justice, as this address says, from a Parliament 
 sitting iii London. If there be such a man in this room let him understand 
 that I am not the man to condemn him or to express surprise at the opinion 
 at which he has arrived. But I would ask him in return for that, that he 
 would give me at least for a few minutes a patient hearing, and he will find 
 that, whether justice may come from the north or the south, or the east or 
 the west (cries of "The West," and great cheering) I, at any rate, stand 
 as a friend to the most complete justice to the people of this island. When 
 discussing the question of Parliamentary Reform, I have often heard it 
 asserted that the people of Ireland, and I am not speaking of those who arc 
 hopeless of good from a Parliament in London, but that the people of Ireland 
 generally imagine that the question of Parliamentary Reform has 
 very little importance for them. Now I undertake to say, and I 
 think I can make it clear to this meeting, that whatever be the 
 importance of that question to any man in England or Scotland,, 
 if the two islands are to continue under Imperial parliamentary govern- 
 ment, it is of more importance to every Irishman. You know that
 
 5-1 
 
 the Parliament of which I am a member contains 658 members, of 
 whom 105 cross the Channel from Ireland, and when they go to 
 London they meet supposing all the members of the House of Commons 
 gathered together 553 members, who are returned for Great Britain. Xow, 
 suppose that all your 105 members were absolutely good and honourable 
 representatives of the people of Ireland I will not say Tories, or Whigs, or 
 Radicals, or Repealers, but anything you like, let every man imagine that 
 all these members were exactly the sort of men he would wish to go from 
 Ireland, when the 105 arrive in London they meet with the 553 who are 
 returned from Great Britain. Xow, suppose that the system of Par- 
 liamentary representation in Great Britain is very bad, that it represents very 
 few persons in that great island, and that those who appear to be repre- 
 sented are distributed in the small boroughs over different parts of the 
 country, and in the counties under the thumb and finger of the landlords, it 
 is clear that the whole Parliament, although your 105 members may be 
 very good men, must still be a very bad Parliament. Therefore, if any man 
 imagines and I should think no man can imagine that the representation 
 of the people in Ireland is in a very good state still, if he fancies it is in a 
 good state unless the representation of Great Britain were at least equally 
 good, you might have a hundred excellent Irish members in Parliament at 
 Westminster ; but the whole 658 members might be a very bad Par- 
 liament for the United Kingdom. The member for a borough or a county 
 in Ireland, when he goes to London, votes for measures for the whole king- 
 dom ; and a member for Lancashire or for Warwickshire, or for any other 
 county or borough in Great Britain, t votes for measures not only for Great 
 Britain but also for Ireland, and therefore, all parts of the United Kingdom 
 every county, every borough, every parish, every family, every man 
 has a clear and distinct and undoubted interest in a Parliament that 
 shall fairly and justly represent the whole nation. Xow, look for a 
 moment at two or three facts with regard to Ireland alone. I have 
 stated some facts with regard to England and Scotland at recent meetings 
 held across the Channel. Xow for two or three facts with regard to Ireland. 
 In Ireland you have five boroughs returning each one member, the average 
 number of electors in each of these boroughs being only 172. You have 13 
 boroughs, the average number being 316. You have nine other boroughs 
 with an average number of electors of 497. You have, therefore, 27 
 boroughs whose whole number of electors, if they were all put together, is 
 only 9,453, or an average of 350 electors for each member. I must tell 
 you further that you have a single county with nearly twice as many 
 voters as the whole of those 27 boroughs. Your 27 boroughs have only 
 9,453 electors, and the county of Cork has 16,107 electors, and returns but 
 two members. But that is not the worst of the case. It happens both in 
 Great Britain and Ireland, wherever the borough constituencies are so small, 
 that it is almost impossible that they should be independent; a very acute 
 lawyer, for example, in one of those boroughs a very influential clergyman, 
 whether of your church or ours when I say ours, I do not mean mine, but 
 the Church of England half-a-dozen men cembining together, or a little 
 corruption from candidates going with a well-filled purse, these are the
 
 55 
 
 influences brought to bear upon those small boroughs both in England and 
 Ireland. A great many of them return their members by means of cor- 
 ruption, more or less, and a free and real representation of the people is 
 hardly ever possible in a borough of that small size. But if I were to com- 
 pare your boroughs with your counties, see how it stands. You have 39 
 borough members, with 30, 000 electors, and you have 64 county members, 
 with 172,000 electors. Therefore you see that the members are so dis- 
 tributed that the great populations have not one quarter of the influence in 
 Parliament which those small populations in the small boroughs have. We 
 come next to another question, which is of great consequence. Not only 
 are those small boroughs altogether too small for independence, but if we 
 come to your large county constituencies, we find that from the peculiar 
 circumstances and the relations which exist between the voter and the 
 owner of the land, there is scarcely any freedom of election. Even in your 
 counties I should suppose that if there was no compulsion from the 
 landowners or their agents, that in at least three-fourths of this island the 
 vote of the county electors would be by a vast majority in favour of the 
 Liberal candidates. I am not speaking merely of men who profess a sort of 
 liberality which just enables them to go with their party, but I speak of men 
 who would be thoroughly in earnest in carrying out, as far as they were 
 able, in Parliament, the opinions which they were sent to represent by the 
 large constituencies who elected them. The question of the ballot is, in my 
 opinion, of the greatest importance in Great Britain and Ireland, but is of more 
 importance in the counties than it is in the large boroughs. For example : 
 in Great Britain, in such boroughs as Edinburgh and Glasgow, and Manchester 
 and Birmingham, and the metropolitan boroughs, where the number of electors 
 runs from 10,000 to 25,000, bribery is of no avail, because you could not bribe 
 thousands of men. To bribe 100 or 200 would not alter the return at an 
 election with so large a constituency. But what you want with the ballot is, 
 that in the counties where the tenant farmers vote, and where they live upon 
 their land without the security of a lease, or without the security of any law to 
 to give them compensation for any improvements they have made upon the 
 land, the tenant farmer feels himself always liable to injury, and sometimes to 
 ruin, if he gets into a dispute with the agent or the landowner with regard to the 
 manner in which he has exercised his franchise. And what will be very 
 important also, if you have the ballot, your elections will be tranquil, without 
 disorder and without riot. Last week, or the week before, there was an 
 election in one of your great counties. Well, making every allowance that can 
 be made for the supposed exaggerations of the writers of the two parties, it is 
 quite clear to everybody that the circumstances of that election, though not 
 absolutely uncommon in Ireland, were still such as to be utterly discreditable to 
 a real representative system. And you must bear in mind that there is no 
 other people in the world that considers that it has a fair representative system 
 unless it has the ballot. The ballot is universal almost in the United States. 
 It is almost universal in the colonies, at any rate in the Australian colonies ; it 
 is almost universal on the continent pf Europe, and in the new parliament of 
 North Germany, which is about soon to be assembled, every man of 25 years of 
 .age is to be allowed to vote, and tj> vote by ballot. Now, I hold, without any
 
 50 
 
 fear of contradiction, that the intelligence and the virtues of the people of 
 Ireland are not represented in the Parliament. You have your wrongs to 
 complain of wrongs centuries oM, and wrongs that long ago the people of Ireland 1 , 
 
 and, I venture to say, the people of Great Britain united with Ireland 
 
 My friend up there will not listen to the end of my sentence. I say that ths 
 people of Great Britain, acting with the people of Ireland, in a fair repre- 
 sentation of the whole, would long ago have remedied every just grievance 
 of which you could complain. Now, I will take two questions which I 
 treated upon the other evening. I will ask about one question that 
 is, the question of the supremacy of the Church in Ireland. Half 
 the people of England are Nonconformists. They are not in favour 
 of an Established Church anywhere, and it is utterly impossible that 
 they could be in favour of an Established Church in an island like this an 
 Established Church formed of a mere handful of the population, in opposi- 
 tion to the wishes of the nation. Now take the principality of Wales. I 
 suppose that four out of five of the population there are Dissenters, anil 
 they are not in favour of maintaining a religious Protestant establishment 
 in Ireland. The people of Scotland have also seceded in such large numbers 
 from their Established Church, although of a democratic character, that I. 
 suppose those who have seceded are a considerable majority of the whole 
 people, they are not in favour of maintaining an ecclesiastical establish- 
 ment in Ireland in opposition to the views of the great majority of your 
 people. Take the other question, that of land. There is nobody in Great 
 Britain of the great town population, of the middle class, or of the still 
 more numerous working class, who has any sympathy with that 
 condition of the law and of the administration of the law which has 
 worked such mischiefs in your country. But these Nonconformists,, 
 whether in England, Wales, or Scotland, these great middle classes, and 
 still greater working classes, are in the position that you are. Only sixteen. 
 of every hundred have a vote, and those sixteen are so arranged that whea 
 their representatives get to Parliament they turn out for the most part to be 
 no real representatives of the people. I will tell you fairly that you, as the 
 less populous and less powerful part of this great nation you of all the men 
 in the United Kingdom, have by far the strongest interest in a thorough 
 reform of the Imperial Parliament, and 1 believe that you yourselves could 
 not do yourselves by yourselves more complete justice than you can do- 
 fairly acting with the generous millions of my countrymen in whose name I 
 stand here. You have on this platform two members of the Reform League 
 from London. I received yesterday, or the day before, a telegram from the 
 Scottish Reform League, from Glasgow. I am not sure whether there is a 
 copy of it in any of the newspapers, but it was sent to me, and I presume 
 it was sent to me that I might read it if I had the opportunity of meeting' 
 any of the unenfranchised men of this city. It says : The Scottish Reform 
 League request you to convey to the Reformers in Ireland their deep sym- 
 pathy. They sincerely hope that soon in Ireland as in Scotland and 
 England, Reform Leagues may be formed in every town to secure to the 
 people their political rights. Urge upon our friends in Ireland their duty 
 to promote this great movement, and to secure at home those benefits which;
 
 57 
 
 thousands of their fellow-countrymen are forced to seek in other l.inrlr 
 where land and State Church grievances are unknown. We also seek co- 
 operation, knowing that our freedom, though secure lo-morrow, would, not 
 be safe so long as one portion of the United Kingdom were less free than 
 the others. There is the outspoken voice of the representatives of that 
 great multitude that only a fortnight since I saw passing through the streets 
 of Glasgow. For three hours the procession passed, with all the emblems 
 and symbols of their various trades, and the streets for two or three miles 
 were enlivened by banners, and the air was filled with the sounds of music 
 from their bands. Those men but spoke the same language that was heard 
 in the West Fading, in Manchester, in Birmingham, and in London, and you 
 men of Dublin, and of Ireland, you never made a mistake more grievous 
 in your lives than for you to come to the conclusion that there are 
 not millions of men in Great Britain willing to do you full justice. I am 
 very sorry that my voice is not what it was, and when I think of the 
 work that is to be done sometimes I feel it is a pity we grow old so fast. 
 But years ago, when I have thought of the condition of Ireland, of its 
 sorrows and wrongs, of the discredit that its condition has brought upon 
 the English, the Irish, and the British name, I have thought, if I could be 
 in all other things the same, but by birth an Irishman, there is not a town 
 in this island I would not visit for the purpose of discussing the great Irish 
 question, and of rousing my countrymen to some great and united action. 
 I do not believe in the necessity of widespread and perpetual misery. I do 
 not believe that we are placed on this island, and on this earth, that one 
 man might be great and wealthy, and revel in every profuse indulgence* 
 and five, six, nine, or ten men should suffer the abject misery which we see 
 so commonly in the world. With your soil, your climate, and your active 
 and spirited race, I know not what they might not do. There have been, 
 reasons to my mind why soil and climate, and the labour of your population, 
 have not produced general comfort and competence for all. The address 
 speaks of the friendly feeling and the sympathy which I have hr.d for 
 Ireland during my political career. When I first went into the- House of 
 Commons the most prominent figure in it was Daniel O'Connell. I have 
 sat by his side for hours during the discussions in that House, and listened 
 to observations both amusing and instructive on what was passing 
 tinder discussion. I have seen him, too, more than once upon our 
 platform of the Anti- Corn-law League. I recollect that on one occasion 
 he sent to Ireland expressly for a newspaper for me, which contained a 
 report of a speech which he made against the corn law when the corn law 
 was passing through Parliament in 1815, and we owe much to his exertions- 
 in connection with that question, for almost the whole Liberal I suppose 
 the whole Liberal party of the Irish representatives in Parliament 
 supported the measure of free trade of which we were the promi- 
 nent advocates ; and I know of nothing that was favourable to freedom, 
 whether in connection with Ireland or England, that O'Connell did not 
 support with all his great powers. I kno\v nothing pleasantcr, and hardly, 
 anything more useful, than personal recollections of this nature. Why is 
 it, now, there should be any kind of schism between the Liberal people of
 
 Ireland and the Liberal people of Great Britain ? I don't ask you to join 
 hands with supremacy and oppression, whether in your island or ours. 
 "What I ask you is, to open your heart of hearts, and join hands for a real 
 and thorough working union for freedom with the great people of Great 
 Britain. Before I sit down, I must be allowed to advert to a point which 
 has been much commented upon a paragraph in my speech made the other 
 night with regard to the land. There are newspapers in Dublin which I 
 need not name, because I am quite sure you can find them out which do 
 not feel any strong desire or conscientious compulsion to judge fairly 
 anything I may say amongst the various measures which I propose for what 
 I shall call the pacification, and redemption if you like, of the peopleof Ireland. 
 It was this I said : "It is of the first importance that the people of Ireland, 
 by some process or other, should have the opportunity of being made the 
 possessors of their own soil. You will know perfectly well that I am not 
 about to propose a copy of the villanous crimes of 200 years ago, to confiscate 
 the lands of the proprietors, here or elsewhere. I propose to introduce a 
 system which would gradually, no doubt rapidly and easily, without injuring 
 anybody, make many thousands who are now tenant farmers, without lease 
 and security, the owners of their farms in this island. This is my plan, and I 
 want to restate it with a little further explanation, in order that these gentle- 
 men to whom I have referred may not repeat the very untrue, and I may say 
 dishonourable comments which they have made upon me. There are many large 
 estates in Ireland which belong to rich families in England, families not only 
 of the highest rank, but of the highest character, because I will venture to 
 say there are not to be found amongst the English nobility families of more 
 perfect honourableness and worth than some of those to whom my plan 
 would be offered ; and, therefore, 1 am not speaking against the aristo- 
 cracy, against those families, or against property, or against any body, or 
 against anything that is good. I say, that if Parliament were to appoint a 
 commission, and give it, say, at iirst, up to the amount of five millions 
 sterling, the power to negotiate or treat with those great families in Eng- 
 land who have great estates in Ireland, it is probable that some of those 
 great estates might be bought at a not very unreasonable price. I am of 
 opinion it would be the cheapest money that the Imperial Parliament ever 
 expended, even though it became possessed of those estates at a price con- 
 siderably above the market price. But I propose it should be worked in 
 this way. I will take a case. I will assume that this commission has got 
 a considerable estate into its possession, bought from some present owner of 
 it. I will take one farm, which I will assume to be worth 1,000, for 
 which the present tenant is paying a rent of 50 a year. He has no lease. 
 He has no security. He makes almost no permanent improvement of any 
 kind ; and he is not quite sure whether, when he has saved a little more 
 money, he will not take his family off to the United States. Now we -^11 
 assume ourselves, if you like, to be that commission, and that we have before 
 us the farmer who is the tenant on that particular farm, for which he pays 
 50 a year, without lease or security, and which lassume to beworth 1,000. 
 The Government, 1 believe, lends money to Irishlandowners for drainage pur- 
 poses at about 3J per cent per annum. Suppose the Government were to
 
 59 
 
 go to this farmer and say, " You would not have any objection to become 
 possessed of this farm ?" " No, not the slightest," he might say, " but how 
 is that to be done ?" In. this way ; tell the farmer you may pay 50 a 
 year, that is, 5 per cent, on one thousand pounds ; the Government can 
 afford to do these transactions for 3i per cent.; if you will pay 60 a year 
 for a given number of years, which any of the actuaries of the insurance 
 offices, or any good arithmetician may soon calculate, if you will pay 60 
 for your rent, instead of 50, it may be fifteen, or twenty years, or more, 
 at the end of that time the farm will be yours, without any further payment. 
 I want you to understand how this is. If the farmer paid ten pounds a 
 year more towards buying his farm, the fact is, that the 1,000 the Govern- 
 ment would pay for the farm would not cost the Government more than 
 35, and therefore the difference between .35 and 60 being 25, would be 
 the sum which that farmer, in his rent, would be paying to the commission, 
 that is, the Government, for the redemption of his farm. Thus, at the end 
 of a very few years the farmer would possess his own farm, leaving a perfect 
 security. All the time nobody could turn him out if he paid his rent, and 
 nobody could touch him for any improvement he made on his land. The 
 next morning after he made that agreement, he would speak to his wife and 
 to his big boy, who had perhaps been idling about for a long time, and there 
 would not be a stone on the land that would not be removed, not a weed 
 that he would not pull up, not a particle of manure that he would not save ; 
 there would not be anything that he would not do with a zeal and an 
 enthusiasm which he had never known before to cultivate that farm ; and 
 by the time the few years had run on when the farm should become his 
 without any further purchase, he would have turned a dilapitated, miserable 
 little farm into a garden for himself and family. Now, this statement may 
 be commented on by some of the newspapers. You will understand that I 
 do not propose a forced purchase, or confiscation. I would undertake even to 
 give if I were the Government to every one of these landlords twenty 
 per cent, more for his estate than it will fetch in any market in London or in 
 Dublin, and I say that to do this would produce a marvellous change in 
 the sentiments of the people, and in the condition of agriculture in Ireland. 
 But I saw in one of the papers a question to which I may give a reply. 
 It wos said, how would you like to have a commission come down into 
 Lancashire and insist on buying your factories ? I can only say that if 
 they will give me 10 per cent, or 20 per cent, more than they are worth 
 they shall have them to-morrow. But I do not propose that the commission 
 should come here and insist on buying these estates. They say, further, 
 Why should a man in Ireland keep his estate, and not a man in England 
 who has an estate in Ireland ? There is this difference. A man in Ireland, 
 if he has an estate of 10,000 acres, it is probably his ancestral home. He 
 has ties to this which it would be monstrous to think of severing in such 
 a manner, but a man living in England, who is not an Irishman, and never 
 comes over here except to receive his rents (which, by the way, he generally 
 gets through his bankers in London), who has no particular tie to this 
 country, and who comes over here occasionally merely because he feels 
 that, as a great proprietor in Ireland, it would be scandalous never to show
 
 GO 
 
 his face on his property and amongst his tenants to such a man there is 
 nothing much of sentiment in it that he should not part with his land at a 
 fair price. I have been charged with saying very severe things of the 
 English aristocracy. Now, it is not true in the sense in which it is imputed 
 to me. I have always said that there are many men in the English aris- 
 tocracy who would be noblemen in the sight of their fellow-men, although 
 they had no titles and no coronets. There are men amongst them of aa 
 undoubted patriotism as any man in this building, or in this island, and there 
 are men amongst them, who when they saw that a great public object is to be 
 served for the benefit of their fellow-men, would make as great sacrifices 
 as any one of us would be willing to do. I am of opinion therefore, I 
 may be wrong, but I will not believe I am until it is proved, I am of 
 opinion that if this question were discussed in Parliament when the next 
 Irish land question is discussed, and if there was a general sentiment in the 
 House of Commons that some measure like this would be advantageous for 
 Ireland, and if it were so expressed, it may be assumed that it would be 
 accepted to a large extent by the people of the United Kingdom, then 1 
 think that a commission so appointed would find no difficulty whatever in 
 discovering noblemen and rich men in England, in Scotland too, who are the 
 possessors of great estates in Ireland, who would be willing to negotiate for 
 their transfer, and that commission, by the process I have indicated, might 
 transfer them gradually but speedily to the tenant farmers of this country. 
 I am told that I have not been much in Ireland, and do not know much of 
 it. I recollect a man in England during the American war asking me a 
 question about America. When I gave him the answer it did not agree 
 with his opinion, and he said, "I think you have never been in America, 
 have you?" I said I had not; and he replied, "Well, I have been, 
 there three times, and I know something of them." He was asking 
 me whether I thought the Yankees would pay when they borrowed 
 money to carry on the war ; and I thought they would. But, as he 
 had been there, he thought his opinion was worth more than mine. 
 I told him I knew several people who had lived in England all their 
 lives, and yet knew very little about England. I am told that if I were to 
 live in Ireland longer amongst the people I should have a different opinion, 
 that I should think the church of a small minority was honest, in the face of 
 the great church of the majority; that I should think it was not the fault of 
 the landowners or of the law in any degree, but the fault of the tenants that 
 everything went wrong with regard to the land ; and that I should find that 
 it was the Government that was mostly right, and the legislation right, 
 and that it was the people that were mostly wrong. There are certain 
 questions with regard to any country that you may settle in your own house, 
 never having seen that country even upon a map. This you may settle, 
 that that which is just is just everywhere, and that men, from those of the 
 highest culture even to those of the most moderate capacity, whatever may 
 be their race, whatever their colour, have implanted in their hearts by their 
 Creator, wiser much than these men, the knowledge and the love of justice. 
 I will tell you that, since the day when I sat beside O'Connell and at aix 
 earlier day, that I have considered this question of Ireland. In 1849, for
 
 61 
 
 several weeks in tlie autumn, and for several weeks in the autumn of 1852, 
 \ came to Ireland expressly to examine these questions by consulting with 
 all classes of the people in every part of the island. I will undertake 
 to say that I believe there is no man in England who has more fully studied 
 the evidence given before the celebrated Devon commission in regard to 
 Ireland than I have. Therefore I dare stand up before any Irishman or English- 
 man to discuss the Irish question. I say that the plans, the theories, the policy of 
 legislation of my opponents in this matter all have failed signally, deplorably, 
 disastrously, ignominiously, ami, therefore, I say that I have a right to come in 
 and offer the people of Ireland, as I would offer to the people of Great 
 Britain and the Imperial Parliament, a wise and just policy upon this ques- 
 tion. You know that I have attended great meetings in England within the 
 last two months, and in Scotland also. I think that I am at liberty to tender 
 to you from those scores, or hundreds of thousands of men the hand of 
 fellowship and goodwill. I wish I might be permitted when I go back, as in 
 fact, I think by this address that I am permitted to say to them, that araidst 
 the factions by which Ireland has been torn, amidst the many errors that have 
 been committed, amidst the passions that have been excited, amidst the hopes 
 that have been blasted, and amidst the misery that has been endured, there is 
 still iu this island, and amongst its people, a heart that can sympathise with 
 those who turn to them with a fixed resolution to judge them fairly, and to do 
 them justice. (Loud cheers, which were prolonged for several minutes, the 
 audience rising and waving their hats.) I have made my speech. I have said 
 my say. I have fulfilled my small mission to you. I thank you from my 
 heart for the kindness with which you have received me, which I shall never 
 forget. And if I have in past times felt an unquenchable sympathy with 
 the sufferings of your people, you may rely upon it that if there be an Irish 
 member to speak for Ireland, he will find me heartily by his sile. 
 
 SPEECH AT MANCHESTER. 
 
 AT the great Reform Banquet in the Free-trade Hall, Manchester, 
 November 20th, 1866, Mr. Bright, M.P., who was present, rose 
 amidst enthusiastic cheering, continuing for several minutes, the 
 greater part of the audience standing. He said : 
 
 Although, perhaps, this is one of the most striking and important 
 meetings which have been held in this country during the last few years, you 
 will, perhaps, be surprised to learn that I came to it with a sense almost of 
 indifference : not indifference as to its importance ; but with an absence of 
 that feeling of responsibility which has pressed so much upon me, on some 
 recent occassions. For the committee were kind enough to sond round to
 
 G2 
 
 their guests a list of the speakers who were expected to address the meeting. 
 I found them much more numerous than is common, and I found my name 
 about half way down the list. I took it, therefore, for granted that I could 
 come, for once, in some degree, as a spectator and a listener, rather than as a 
 prominent actor at the meeting. Some gentlemen who were expected to be 
 here are not here Mr. Stansfeld, because he is ill ; Mr. Layard, because 
 he has not returned from the Continent. And Mr. Forster, who seems less 
 able to occupy the time of an audience when he comes into Lancashire than 
 he is in Yorkshire has spoken, I may say, uttering the feeling of the whole 
 meeting, for a very much shorter time than we had a right to expect. I 
 shall trust, therefore, to those who come after me to say a good deal which 
 I shall not take up your time in attempting to say to-night. During the 
 last memorable session of Parliament you will probably recollect that it was 
 a very common thing in the mouths of the opponents of the Government bill 
 to say that the working men the aggrieved party felt no grievance ; for 
 they scarcely expressed any opinion on the bill in its favour, or, indeed, 
 any opinion at all on the question of their own admission to the franchise. 
 I was repeatedly charged with being in the position of a leader in a case, 
 and it was said that, after all, I had no clients and no following. There 
 was a general taunt uttered that we were very much exaggerating the case 
 of the working men, and that the condition of that large class was so 
 comfortable and so prosperous that they were perfectly content with the 
 Government as it is carried on by a Parliament so inadequately representing 
 the whole nation. I suspect that the argument, so far as it was uttered, 
 and had any force, has now been fully and satisfactorily answered. But 
 these gentlemen have turned right round, and have now another thing to 
 say about our meetings. They say that the middle class stands entirely 
 aloof, that nobody really cares for reform but the working men, and that no 
 great question can be earned, or sensibly affected, in this country by the 
 opinions and action of working men alone. They point to the great meet- 
 ings that have been held, and after dividing the notorious and proved 
 magnitude of the meetings by four or six, they then conclude that there 
 were a few thousands of working men present ; but members of Parliament, 
 manufacturers, merchants, and what they call the respectable and 
 influential clusses were found to be entirely absent. But they forge ; 
 these meetings at which they say working men only attended were meetings 
 called expressly by working men and for working men. But if they want t* 
 know, or wanted to know, how far the main objects of those meetings receive I 
 sympathy from a more powerful class, they might have come to those 
 meetings to have learned. In Birmingham, as you know, the Mayor 
 was in the procession, and the chief constable of the town took 
 charge of all the arrangements of it ; and in the great 1 own-hall 
 of that city, the Mayor took the chair at the evening meeting, and I 
 venture to say that it would be impossible in any town in this kingdom to 
 assemble upon the platform a greater amount of what these gentlemen call 
 respectability, wealth, and station in the town than were assembled there 
 and then. If they had come to this hall on the evening of the great 
 meeting in Manchester, raid if they had gone to the Town-ball of Leeds, or
 
 G3 
 
 to the City-hall of Glasgow, they would have found that after the scores of 
 thousands that had attended the great open-air meeting in the daytime there 
 was a meeting most important, most influential, omnipotent indeed, within 
 that town in which it was held. In the town of Leeds, I was told nearly 
 1,000 persons paid 5s. each to attend the meeting in the Town-hall, and I 
 think that is some sign of the class of persons who attended. But if there 
 was any question on this matter, I would ask those gentlemen to come on 
 this platform to-night. Here is the largest and finest hall in Britain, the 
 largest and finest hall in Europe, I believe the largest and finest hall in the 
 world, and yet this hall is crowded with persons to whom our opponents, I 
 think generally, unless they were very fastidious, would admit the 
 term respectable and influential. I doubt if there has ever been held in 
 this kingdom, within our time, a political banquet more numerous, more 
 influential, more unr.nirnous, more grand in every respect, than that which, 
 is held here to-night. Just now, it is the fashion to flatter and to court the 
 middle class. The middle class are told that since the Reform Bill of 1832 
 political power has been in their hands; before 1832 it was with the lords 
 and great landowners, but since 1832 it has been in the hands of the middle 
 class, and now the middle class are asked whether they are willing to 
 surrender that power into the hands of a more numerous, and, as these 
 persons assert, a dangerous class, who would swamp, not the highest class 
 of lords and great landowners, highest in social position, but would swamp 
 also the great middle class with whom power is now said to rest. And 
 they try to teach the middle class that there is an essentially different 
 interest between them and the great body of the people who are not yet 
 admitted into that clcss. They say the one class is in power, and the other 
 class is outside, and out of power, and they warn the middle class against 
 admitting the outsiders into partnership with them, for fear that they 
 should dethrone the middle class and set up an unintelligent, unreasoning, 
 and selfish power of their own. That is the sort of argument which is used 
 to the middle class to induce them to take no part in any measure that shall 
 admit the working class to a participation in political power. I should be 
 ashamed to stand on any platform and to employ such an argument as this. 
 Is there to be found in the writings or the speaking of any public man con- 
 nected with the Liberal or the Reform party so dangerous and so outrageous 
 a policy as that which these men pursue ? When separating the great bodv 
 of the people into the middle and the working class, they set class against 
 class, and ask you to join with the past and present monopolists of power 
 in the miserable and perilous determination to exclude for ever the great 
 body of your countrymen from the common rights of the glorious English 
 constitution. There is no greater fallacy than that that the middle classes 
 are in possession of power. The real state of the case, if it were put in 
 simple language, would be this that the working men are almost univer- 
 sally excluded, roughly and insolently, from political power, and that the 
 middle class, whilst they have the semblance of it, are defrauded of the 
 reality. The difference and the resemblance is this, that the working men 
 come to the hustings at an election, and when the returning-officer asks 
 for the show of hands every man can hold up his hand although his
 
 name is not upon the register of voters ; every worlung man can 
 vote at that show of hands, but the show of hands is of no avail. 
 The middle class have votes, but those votes are rendered harmless 
 and nugatory by the unfair distribution of them, and there is placed 
 in the voter's hand a weapon which has neither temper nor edge by 
 which he can neither fight for further freedom, nor defend that which 
 his ancestors have gained. On a recent occasion, perhaps it was when 
 I last stood on this platform, I stated certain facts which have not, from 
 that day to this, been contradicted I stated that out of every 100 men 
 throughout the United Kingdom, grown-up men, liable to taxes, expected 
 to perform all the duties of life, responsible to the laws, 84 were excluded 
 i'rorn the franchise, and that 16 only were included. I want to ask whether 
 the 10 out of the 100 may be said to include all the middle class ? But there 
 is another fact, if possible more astonishing still, and that is that three men 
 out of every 100 throughout the United Kingdom do apparently by their 
 votes return an actual majority of the present House of Commons. But if 
 a majority of the House of Commons be returned by a number so small as 
 three out of every 100 of the men of the United Kingdom, and if the other 
 House of Parliament asks for no votes at all, I ask you whether it is not a 
 fact of the most transparent character that power, legislative and governing, 
 in this country does not rest with the middle classes ? What Mr. Forster 
 says is quite true. You may have suffrage this or that, but you may 
 have distribution of power so and such that even your present representation, 
 bad as it is, may be made something even worse. Take the case of your 
 boroughs, in which alone may be said to rest everything that exists in the 
 United Kingdom of a free election. Divide the boroughs, 254 in number, 
 into two classes, those under 20,000 inhabitants and those over that number. 
 Under 20,000 there are 145 boroughs ; over it 109. But the boroughs under 
 20,000 return 215 members, against 181 that are returned by the boroughs 
 over 20,000. But that gives only a very misty idea of the state of the case. 
 Those boroughs over 20,000 inhabitants, having 39 members fewer than the 
 the boroughs under 20,000, still are in this position their members represent 
 six tunes as many electors, seven times as much population, and fourteen 
 times as much payment of income-tax as the larger number of members 
 represent. It is clear beyond all cavil for figures, after all, are difficult 
 things to meet and controvert if they are correct that your representative 
 system, even in the boroughs where alone it exists in any life at all is a 
 representative system almost wholly delusive, and defrauds the middle 
 classes of the power which the act of 1832 professed to give them. And 
 your county representation is almost too sad a subject to dwell upon. Every- 
 man who occupies a house or land of an annual value less than 50 is excluded; 
 the number of freeholders in the main diminishes, and really there remains 
 scarcely anything of independent power and freedom of election within the 
 majority of the counties of the United Kingdom. So, then, I come to this 
 conclusion, that the working classes are excluded and insulted, and that tin; 
 middle classes are defrauded ; and I presume that those who really do wield 
 the power despise the middle classes for their silence under this system:. 
 When I look at tlio qrervt middle cl's.iof this country, and see all that it has
 
 65 
 
 done, and see the political position iu \vliicli it has been to some extent 
 content to rest, I cannot help saying that it reminds me very much of the 
 language which the ancient Hebrew patriarch addressed to one of his sons. 
 He said : " Issachar is a strong ass, couching down between two burdens." 
 On the one side there is the burden of seven and a half millions per annum, 
 raised by way of tax, to keep from starvation more than one million two 
 hundred thousand paupers within the United Kingdom and on the other 
 hand, and higher up in the scale, there is mismanagement the most 
 gross, there is extravagance the most reckless, and there is waste 
 the most appalling and disgraceful which haa ever been seen in the 
 government of any country. And this is the grand result of a system 
 which systematically shuts out the millions, and which cajoles the 
 middle classes by the hocus pocus of a Parliamentary Government. Sir, I 
 am delighted beyond measure, after many years of discussion, of contem- 
 plation of labour in connection with this great question I say I am 
 delighted to believe that the great' body of the people, call them middle 
 class or call them working class, are resolved that this state of things shal 
 exist no longer. During the last session of Parliament there has been made 
 by an honest Government an honest attempt to tinker the existing system. 
 For, after all, the bill of the last session, honest and well intended and 
 valuable as it was, was still but a tinkering of a very bad system. But the 
 Tory party refused even to have it tinkered. They remind me very much 
 of a wealthy but a most penurious old gentleman, who lived some years ago 
 in my neighbourhood, and who objected, amongst other expenses, very 
 much to a tailor's bill, and he said that he had found out that a hole would 
 last longer than a patch. I am not sure that that is not the case with Lord 
 Derby and his friends ; for it was one of their great arguments that if the 
 bill of the Government passed it would inevitably follow that something 
 more would almost immediately be demanded. They were so anxious that 
 things should remain as they are that they refused to admit 200,000 more 
 of the middle class by the lowering of the county franchise, and they 
 refused with equal, perhaps with greater pertinacity, to admit 200,000, but, 
 as I believe, not much more than 100,000 working men, to electoral rights. 
 They would not suppress, nor allow the suppression of one single rotten 
 borough, and in fact there was no abuse, however foul, however intolerable, 
 however putrid, to which they would allow the legislative reforming knife 
 to be applied ; and they determined to keep everything just as it is. And 
 now these gentlemen, that we were obliged, to our great misfortune, to 
 contend with so much last session, are in office. They call themselves Her 
 Majesty's servants ; but they have not yet dared to proclaim, that they are 
 the accepted servants of the people. Some of their papers, and some papers 
 which are not theirs, give us to understand, for the papers are often 
 understanding a great many things of which they know nothing, that the 
 Cabinet meetings held during the last fortnight have landed us in this 
 strange position that the men who were against all reform six months ago, 
 are now warmly engaged hi concocting a measure which shall be satisfactory 
 to the great body of the Reformers of this country. My opinion is this : 
 First of all, that the papers know nothing about it ; secondly, that the
 
 G6 
 
 Government, we are obliged to call them a Government, has not made up 
 its inind at all whether it will bring in a Reform Bill or not. In point of 
 fact, Lord Derby is waiting to see what the weather will be. And I suppose 
 they will postpone their decision perhaps for some few weeks to come. Who 
 knows but that they will wait till this day fortnight or yesterday 
 fortnight? Yesterday fortnight, on Monday, the 3rd of December, 
 it is said that, following the example of Birmingham, and the West 
 Hiding, and Glasgow, and Manchester, and Edinburgh, the men con- 
 cerned in the trades in London will make what they call a demonstration, 
 that is, that on behalf of the question of reform they will assemble and 
 will peacefully walk through some of the main streets of the West End 
 of London, for the purpose of showing that they take an interest in this 
 great question. I know nothing of the arrangements, except what I see 
 in the papers ; but it is said that more than 200,000 men have arranged 
 to walk in that f procession. I hear on no mean authority that certain 
 persons at the West End are getting up a little alarm at what may 
 happen on the 3rd of December. What will happen we all know. 
 If the police do not interfere to break the peace, the peace will not be 
 broken. And, probably, what happened on the last occasion may be of 
 some use in teaching the Home Secretary his duty on this occasion. There 
 are persons, doubtless, so credulous and so willing to wish well of everybody 
 as to imagine that Lord Derby's Government will bring in a satisfactory 
 Ileform Bill. They say that Sir Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington 
 carried Catholic Emancipation ; that Sir Robert Peel and the Duke of 
 Wellington repealed the Corn Law ; and why should not Lord Derby pass 
 a Reform Bill ? Why, Lord Derby is neither the Duke of Wellington nor 
 Sir Robert Peel. He deserted both those eminent men in 1846, rather than 
 unite with them to repeal the corn lav/ ; and he has never shown, from 
 that hour to this, one atom of statesmanship, or one spark of patriotism, 
 that would lead us to expect that, on this occasion, he would turn round 
 and, neglecting his party, do something for his country. It is all very well 
 to say that if the Government bring in a very good bill, we who want a 
 very good bill will support it. But it is no use dealing in phraseology and 
 platitudes of that sort. Look at the Cabinet of Lord Derby ; look Avhat 
 the members of it said and did during late years, and during the' late par- 
 liamentary session. Lord Derby has told us that it was his mission to stem 
 democracy ; his friends in the House of Commons declared last session that 
 the passing of that bill of the Government would be to hand over the 
 country to the democracy of the working classes. Mr. Disraeli, in his 
 speeches, was ingenious beyond his fellows, as indeed he generally is, for 
 if he had not been he would not have been in the position in which we find 
 him. But Mr. Disraeli was anxious to cut off all free election in counties. 
 He is of opinion, so far as I gathsr from his speeches, that the more entirely 
 the county representation can be made conterminous with the great estates 
 of the peers and the great landowners, the more entirely it will be after his 
 own fashion and his own wishes. There is no more perilous idea can be 
 entertained by any statesman ; if you once get the nominees of the great 
 landowners and the lords on the one side of the House, and the repre-
 
 67 
 
 sentatives of everybody else on the other side of the House, the beginning 
 of the end will have come. And whilst Mr. Disraeli is tickling the eara 
 and the fancy of the country gentlemen behind him, he is propounding a 
 plan which, if it were carried into effect, would end in the utter extinction 
 of the political power of the country gentlemen and the peerage of England. 
 Mr. Disraeli and Lord Stanley were the men in the last Derby Government 
 who proposed to disfranchise 70,000 county voters whose property was 
 within the limits of the boroughs, and I cannot believe that men who made 
 such a proposition seven or eight years ago can produce a good honest 
 Reform Bill now. Lord Stanley made a speech during the discussions on 
 the late bill which his party and their press said was unanswerable. It was 
 a speech leading to this conclusion, that he would give no votes to any of 
 the working class until he saw, by the distribution of seats, that those votes 
 could be made of no use to them. And Lord Stanley lent himself to an 
 unhappy trick, intended, as it appeared to us, to take the Government and 
 the House by surprise, and by which, by gaining a sudden and accidental 
 division, he might have destroyed both the bill and the Government. Lord 
 Cranbourne is a member of this Cabinet, Lord Robert Cecil that was a 
 short time ago, Lord Cranbourne quarrelled violently with Mr. Gladstone 
 because Mr. Gladstone said the working men were of our own flesh and 
 blood. He treated that observation very much in the same way that the 
 Carolinian planter and slaveholder in the Senate of the United States would 
 have replied to my friend Mr. Sumner if he had said the black and white 
 were equal in the eye of God, and of one flesh and blood. General 
 Peel is a member of this Government, and he protested violently against 
 any reduction of the franchise, as indeed did Sir Stafford Northcote, who 
 is, I think, now the President of the Board of Trade. I want to ask you 
 whether from these men you are to expect, you are to wait for, with anxious 
 and hopeful looking forward, any Reform Bill ? And, after all these 
 speeches had been made, Lord Derby did his utmost to prevail upon Mr. 
 Lowe to become a member of his Cabinet. If, after all this, they were to 
 attempt to manufacture and introduce a Reform Bill, they would cover 
 themselves and their party with humiliation and with certain failure. I 
 know that in this country politicians change sides ; office has a wonderful 
 effect upon men. I suppose that there are men here such as were described 
 by our witty friend, Mr. Hosea Biglow, in painting the character of some 
 politicians in America. He said of them as we perhaps may say of Lord 
 Derby and his party, 
 
 " A merciful Providence fashioned them hollow, 
 On purpose that they might their principles swallow." 
 
 But, notwithstanding that provision, that merciful provision, for statesmen, 
 I confess that I do not believe that the Government have determined to 
 bring in a Reform Bill, or that they can by any possibility bring in a bill 
 which the Reformers of this country can accept. They have done everything 
 during the past session by fraudulent statements by insiilts to the people 
 by the most evident baseness of party action to destroy the moderate 
 and honest attempt of Lord Russell to improve the representation. And I 
 do not believe that in one short year they can turn round ; raid, capacious
 
 G8 
 
 ; y be the internal cavity of the Tory Government, I think they canno 
 in one short year swallow all their Conservative principles. If a man were 
 to tell me that he had a broth composed of half-a-dozen most poisonous 
 ingredients, and that he could make of it a most wholesome dish, I think I 
 should not believe him. And if he tells me that Derby, and Disraeli, and 
 Stanley, and Cranbourne, and General Peel, and the rest of them, after the 
 speeches to which I listened six months ago, are about to produce a whole- 
 some, and salutary, and liberal Reform Bill, I must ask him not to impose 
 for a moment on my understanding. The enemies of the bill of 1866 cannot 
 become the honest friends of reform in 1867 and the conspirators of the 
 session which has just expired cannot become honourable statesmen in 
 the session which is about to commence. My opinion may be no better 
 than that of any other man. This, however, may be good advice that all 
 reformers should be on the watch, for there are enemies enough to our 
 ciuse, and false friends enough to convince us that it is by no means out of 
 danger. But the next bill what must it be ? One thing I think we have 
 a right to insist upon, that the next bill which is introduced by a Liberal 
 and Reform Government shall be in its suffrage based upon the ancient 
 borough franchise of the country. Hoiisehold or rating suffrage has existed 
 for centuries in our parishes. It has existed for many years in our municipal 
 corporations. It has never been found either in parish or corporation to be 
 destructive of the interests of the people of those circumscribed districts of 
 the country. I say, therefore, that we ought to stand by the ancient Con- 
 stitution of England. I believe Lord Russell, speaking of him in his 
 private capacity, would be in favour of extending the borough franchise, at 
 least to the limits of the municipal franchise. There is reason to believe 
 tint Mr. Gladstone himself would approve of such a measure. Yv'e know 
 t'.iat the late Attorney-General, one of the most eminent lawyers 
 and one of the most accomplished members of the House of Common*, 
 publicly and openly expressed himself in favour of that change. I 
 believe the middle class, as a rule, the Liberal portion of the middle class, 
 would have no objection to see the franchise extended to all householders in 
 boroughs. I believe if it were ao extended we should arrive at a point at 
 which, so long at any rate as any of us are permitted to meddle with the 
 politics of our country, no further change would be demanded. I therefore 
 am entirely in favour of it, because I believe it to be wise in itself, and 
 becaiise it is the ancient borough franchise of this kingdom. I am in favour 
 of the constitution. I would stand by it ; wherever it afforded support for 
 freedom I would march in its track. That track is so plain that the way- 
 faring man, though a fool, need not err therein. I would be guided by its 
 lights. They have been kept burning by great men among our forefathers 
 for many generations. Our only safety in this warfare is in adhering to the 
 ancient and noble constitution of our country. And when we have restored 
 it to its ancient strength, and invited the great body of the people to take 
 part in political power, then the House of Commons will be the servant of 
 the nation and not its master, and it will do the bidding, not of a small, a 
 limited, often an ignorant, necessarily a selfish class, but the bidding of a 
 great and noble people.
 
 69 
 
 SPEECH IN LONDON. 
 
 ON the 4th December, the day following the great Trades' Demon- 
 stration in London in favour of Parliamentary Reform, Mr. Bright 
 addressed a crowded and most enthusiastic audience in St. James's 
 Hall. He said: 
 
 It is about eiglit years since, in a speech which I delivered on the 
 question of Parliamentary Reform, that I took the opportunity of giving 
 what I thought was somewhat wholesome counsel to the unenfranchised 
 working men of this country. I told them that the monopolists of political 
 power in this country would not willingly surrender that power or any 
 portion of it ; and further, that no class that was excluded could rely upon 
 the generosity of any other class for that justice which it demanded, and 
 that, therefore, although large numbers of the middle class were then, and 
 are now, in favour of the enfranchisement of a large number of the working 
 class, yet that they would not make that groat effort which is necessary to 
 wring political power from those who now hold it and to extend it to those 
 who are now and were then excluded from it. I said that if the working 
 men wished for political power they had only to ask for it in a manner to 
 show the universality of their desire and the union and the power which 
 they were able to bring to bear upon it ; and I recollect particularly making 
 a siiggestion that involved me in a good deal of unfriendly criticism, namely, 
 that I thought the time had come, or would soon come, when it would be 
 the duty of the working class to make use of that great organisation of 
 theirs which extends over the whole country the organisation of trades 
 and friendly societies for the purpose of bringing to bear upon the Govern- 
 ment the entire poAver of their just demand. I said, further, that I believed 
 one year only of the united action of the working class through this existing 
 organisation would wholly change the aspect of the question of Eeform. 
 Now it appears that the wholesome counsel which I gave eight years ago 
 has become the counsel of all those who are in favour of the enfranchisement 
 of the working man, and that counsel has been adopted recently to a large 
 extent, and every man in the kingdom feels that the aspect of the question 
 has been wholly changed. But, as lias been already said to-night, it is very 
 difficult to please those by whom we are opposed ; and, as was said eight 
 years ago, so it is said now, that it is very undesirable that associations like 
 these, that were not formed for political piirposes, should be worked for 
 political ends. That is a matter of which the members of these societies must 
 be held to be the best judges. We have known other societies that did not 
 profess to bs political, which have entered largely into political matters. I
 
 70 
 
 know that some years ago nearly all tlie agricultural societies of the country 
 were converted into political societies, for the purpose of sustaining an Act 
 of Parliament which denied an honest and fair supply of food to the people 
 of this country ; and even now, when the agricultural societies and farmers' 
 clubs meet, we hear that sort of curious and confused political discussion 
 which takes place when the country gentlemen and the county members 
 make speeches to their tenantry and county supporters. But these critics 
 of ours say that this measure the combination of the trades' unions for 
 political purposes is one that excites their fears, and is of a very formidable 
 nature. It was precisely because it would be of a formidable nature that I 
 first recommended it. The fact is, that the millions can scarcely move, but 
 that the few who are timid and in some degree ungenerous in this matter, 
 feel themselves alarmed ; but you cannot help being numerous. If you had 
 had better government during the last 100 years if the land had been 
 more in the hands of the people and less in the hands of a small class if 
 you had had fewer wars, lighter taxes, better instruction, and a freer trade, 
 one-half of those in this country who are now called the working class would 
 have been, in comfort and position, equal to those whom we call the middle 
 class. But this is your great difficulty now, and it is the great difficulty of 
 our opponents you are too numerous, they think, to be let in with safety, 
 and they are finding out that you are too numerous to be kept oxit without 
 danger. But if these associations and the combinations of these societies are 
 formidable, who have made them formidable ? These societies took no part 
 in political movement until they were challenged to it by the speeches, the 
 resolutions, the divisions, and the acts of a great party in the Parliament of the 
 kingdom. Did they fail to have fact and argument in favour of the change 
 proposed last session ? No ; but fact and argument had no effect upon 
 whatever there is of reasoning power in the ranks of the Tory party. Did 
 they think that the working men of this country those who built this 
 great city those who covered this country with great cities those who 
 have cultivated every acre of its area who have made this country a name 
 of power through all time and throughout the whole world did they for 
 one moment imagine that you would lie down and submit, without raising 
 your voice against them, to the scandalous and unjust imputations that 
 were heaped upon you? Did they think that you would be silent for ever, 
 and patient for ever, under a perpetual exclusion from the benefits of the 
 constitution of your country ? If they are dissatisfied with this movement, 
 what would they have? Would they wish that, as men did fifty or sixty 
 years ago, instead of making open demonstration of your opinions, you should 
 conspire with the view of changing the political constitution of your country ? 
 Would they like that you should meet in secret societies, that you should 
 administer to each other illegal oaths, that you should undertake the task 
 of midnight drilling, that you should purchase throughout London and the 
 provinces a supply of arms, that you should in this frightful and terrible 
 manner endeavour to menace the Government, and to wring from them a 
 concession of your rights ? But surely one of two modes must be taken. If 
 there be a deep and wide-spread sentiment of injustice no longer tolerable, 
 then, judging from all past history of all people, one of two modes will be
 
 71 
 
 taken, either that mode so sad and so odious of secret conspiracy, or that 
 mode so grand and so noble which you have adopted. You have at this 
 moment across the Channel, if the reports which the Government sanction 
 are true, an exhibition of a plan which I deplore and condemn. You have 
 there secret societies, and oaths, and drilling, and arms, and menaces of 
 violence and insurrection. Is there any man in England who would like to 
 see the working men of Great Britain driven to any such course in defence 
 or in maintenance of their rights ? Well, I hold, then, that all men in this 
 country, whatever be their abstract opinions on this question of a wide 
 extension of the suffrage, should really rejoice at the noble exhibition, the 
 orderly and grand exhibition of opinion which has been made by the work- 
 ing men of England and Scotland during the past three months. I said that 
 if there be a grievance a deep-seated sentiment that there is a grievance 
 there must necessarily be a voice to express and to proclaim it. What is 
 the grievance of which you complain ? You are the citizens, the native 
 inhabitants of a country which is called constitutional; and what is meant 
 by that is that your Government is not the despotic Government of a 
 monarch, or tho oligarchical Government of an oligarchy ; but that it is 
 a Government, a large and essential portion of which is conducted by 
 honestly elected representatives of the people ; and the grievance is this : 
 that this constitution, so noble in its outline and so noble in its purpose, is 
 defaced and deformed, and that when you look at it it seems in this respect 
 absolutely worse than any other representative constitution existing in the 
 world. For I believe there is no representation whatsoever at this moment 
 in America or in Europe that is so entirely deformed from its natural, just, 
 and beautiful proportions, as is the representative system of this country. 
 What can be more clear than this that the aristocracy of land and of 
 wealth usurp the power in both Houses of Parliament ? The Lords repre- 
 sent themselves, and generally the great landowners, with great fidelity. 
 But, at the same time, we must admit and deplore that at least one-half of 
 the House of Commons is in fast alliance with the majority in the House of 
 Lords. Now, I have said before I repeat it again that there is no security 
 whatsoever for liberty under any Government unless there be an essential 
 power in a fair representation of the nation. An illustrious man, the 
 
 founder of the great province, and now the great State of Pennsylvania 
 
 William Penn in the preface to his constitution for that province a con- 
 stitution of the widest and most generous freedom uses these words : 
 
 "Any Government is free to the people under it, whatever be the frame 
 where the laws rule, and the people are a party to the laws ; and more than 
 this is tyranny, oligarchy, or confusion. " Now, let us ask ourselves, can it 
 be fairly said, can it be said without the most direct falsehood, that the 
 people of this country, through the House of Commons, are really a party to 
 the laws that are made ? It is not at all disputed that only sixteen out of 
 every one hundred men are now on the electoral rolls, and are able 
 all other circumstances favouring, to give their vote at a general election 
 and it is not disputed that half the House of Commons that an absolute 
 majority of that House is elected by a mimber of electors not exceeding 
 altogether three men out of every hundred men in the United Kingdom.
 
 I have taken the trouble to make a little calculation from the facts con- 
 tained in a very useful book published by a very old friend of mine, Mr. 
 Acland, called the "Imperial Poll- Book, ;> from which a great amount of 
 valuable information may be had upon this question. I have taken out the 
 number of votes given at the last contested election that has been held for 
 every borough and county in the United Kingdom since the passing of the 
 Preform Bill, and I find that there being, so far as I know, at least one con- 
 test in every place since that time, the whole number of votes given at the 
 contest in every borough and county is short of the number of 900,000, 
 which is about one in eight of the men in the country ; and if you deduct 
 from that number the double votes, that is the men who vote for more than 
 one county, or who vote for a county and a borough, in all probability there 
 would not be registered more than 800,000 votes at a general election in the 
 United Kingdom where there was a contest in every county and in every 
 borough. But I take the election of 1859, which is the last tlie particulars 
 of which are given in the " Imperial Poll-Book," and I find there that the 
 whole number of votes registered, so far as I could make them out, at the 
 general election of 1859, was under 370, 000. Now, deduct the double votes 
 from this, and probably there would not be at that general election, or at 
 the general election of last year, more than 300,000 or 820,000 men who 
 recorded their votes ? Some other allowances must be made. There are 
 boroughs, and there may be counties, in which the opinion falls so much on 
 one side that there could be no chance of a contest. For example, in the 
 borough which I am permitted to represent there would be no contest, and 
 therefore that borough would not supply any figures to those figures which 
 I am quoting. But there are many boroughs, as we all know, in which 
 there is no contest ; in some boroughs there is no contest because there is 
 no freedom of election. And there are many counties in which there is no 
 contest because there is no freedom of election in those counties. But I quote 
 these numbers to show to you that when the Queen orders through her 
 Ministers what is generally called an appeal to the country, it is at the very 
 utmost an appeal to 800,000 electors, and in all probability the appeal is 
 answered by registered voters numbering from 300,000 to 400,000. 
 Well, after this, then, I undertake to say that the people are not, 
 in the sense of our constitution, a party to the laws, and that the 
 Government of the United Kingdom, in the sense indicated in the quota- 
 tion that I have made from William Perm's preface to his constitu- 
 tion, is not free to this people. And let me tell you what doubtless many 
 men have not thought of, that there is no form of government much worse 
 than the Government of a sham representation. A Parliament like our 
 Parliament has members enough, and just enough of the semblance of repre- 
 sentation, to make it safe for it to do almost anything it likes against the 
 true interests of the nation. There is nothing so safe as a Parliament like 
 this for the commission of what is evil. There is not representation enough 
 to make it truly responsible to the intelligence, and the virtue, and the 
 opinions of the nation. Take a case which is in the recollection of all of us. 
 Is there any man in the world who believes for a moment that any monarch 
 that ever sat on the English throne would have dared in 1815 to have passed
 
 73 
 
 the corn law to have brought into action in this city of London, horse, 
 foot, and artillery to have surrounded his own palace and to have beaten 
 off the people who were protesting against the enactment of that law ? But 
 the Parliament of England did that, and a Parliament of landowners, for 
 the express and only purpose of increasing their own rents by the sacrifice 
 of the comfort, the plenty, the health, and the life of the great body of the 
 people. But to come only to the last session of Parliament. We will not 
 go back to the time before the Reform Act. We will only go to the last session 
 of Parliament. Look at their responsibility then, and their sense of 
 responsibility. Look at the moderation of that bill which was brought in 
 by the late Government. Was it possible to have proposed a more moderate 
 measure than that of the late Government ? Well, but what happened ? A 
 Parliament of landowners and of rich men, who have wholly despised that 
 great national opinion which has been exhibited during the last three or 
 four months, resisted that measure with a pertinacity never exceeded, and 
 with an amount of intrigue, and I say of unfairness to the Government, 
 which they durst not for one single night have attempted if they had felt 
 any real responsibility to the people of this country. And now they resist 
 np to this moment, and for aught I know may resist when they meet at the 
 beginning of February next, and they may possibly resist until the dis- 
 content which is now so general shall become universal, and that which is 
 now only a great exhibition of opinion may become necessarily and inevitably 
 a great and menacing exhibition of force. And these opponents of ours, many 
 of them in Parliament openly, and many of them secretly in the press, have 
 charged ns with being the promoters of a dangerous excitement. They say 
 we are the source of the danger which threatens ; and they have absolutely 
 the effrontery to charge me with being the friend of public disorder. I am 
 one of the people. Surely, if there be one thing in a free country more clear 
 than another, it is that any one of the people may speak openly to the people. 
 If I speak to the people of their rights, and indicate to them the way to 
 secure them if I spealt to the monopolists of power of their danger am I 
 not a wise counsellor both to the people and to their rulers ? Suppose I stood 
 at the foot of Vesuvius or Etna, and 1 saw a hamlet, or a homestead stand- 
 ing upon its slope, and I said to the dwellers in that hamlet, or in that 
 homestead, You see that vapour which ascends from the summit of the 
 mountain. That vapour may become a dense, black smoke that will obscure 
 the sky. You see that trickling of lava from the crevices or fissures in the 
 side of the mountain. That trickling of lava may become a river of fire. 
 You hear that muttering in the bowels of the mountain. That muttering 
 may become a bellowing thunder, the voice of a violent convulsion that may 
 shake half a continent. You know that at your feet is the grave of great 
 cities for which there is no resurrection, as history tells iis dynasties and 
 aristocracies have passed away and their name has been known no more for 
 ever. If 1 say this to the dwellers upon the slope of the mountain, and if 
 there comes hereafter a catastrophe which makes the world to shudder, am 
 I responsible for that catastrophe ? - 1 did not build the mountain, or fill it 
 with explosive materials. I merely warned the men that were in danger. 
 So, now, it is not I who am stimulating men to the violent pursuit of their
 
 74 
 
 acknowledged constitutional rights. We are merely about our lawful busi- 
 ness and you are the citizens of a country that calls itself free, yet you are 
 citizens to whom is denied the greatest and the first blessing of the 
 constitution uuder which you live. If the truth must be told, the Tory 
 party is the turbulent party of this nation. I left the last session of 
 Parliament just about the time when the present Ministers, successful 
 in their intrigues, acceded to office I left the Parliament with a feeling of 
 sadness, of disgust, and of apprehension. I said to myself, I may as well 
 judge of the future by the past. The Parliament of England will not do 
 justice to the people until there happens something that will suddenly open 
 their eyes. I remembered what took place id" the year 1829 when the 
 Duke of Wellington said : Either give political power and representation 
 through Catholic members to the Catholics of the United Kingdom, or 
 encounter the peril and loss of civil war in Ireland. Up to that moment 
 Parliament had refused to do it. Then Parliament consented and the thing 
 was done. In 1832 you were within twenty -four hours of revolution in this 
 country. This great class which sits omnipotent in one House, and hardly 
 less so in the other, might then, and probably would have been extinguished, 
 and what there would have been left except the people it is difficult to 
 imagine. In 1846, although every intelligent man in every country in the 
 world admitted the justice and force of our arguments against the corn law, 
 still it required the occurrence of a crushing and desolating famine in 
 Ireland a famine \vhich destroyed as many lives in that country as 
 would have been destroyed by a great war, and which drove into 
 exile as many of the people of that island rs would have been driven into 
 exile by the most cruel and relentless conquest it required all that before 
 the Parliament of England, the men amongst whom I sit, and whose faces 
 are as familiar to me as those of any person whom I know in life I say that 
 it required all that before Parliament would consent to give tip that in- 
 tolerable wrong of taxing the bread of an industrious people. Now, suppose 
 that fche bill which was brought into the House last session as a franchise 
 bill only which was done, as was admitted by Lord Piussell, in adoption 
 of advice which I had publicly given to the Government, and which advice 
 I believe was eminently sound, and ought to be followed whenever this 
 question is dealt with again by a Liberal and honest Government I say, 
 suppose that that bill, instead of being met with every kind of unfair and 
 ungenerous opposition, had been wisely accepted by the House of Commons 
 and become law, what would have been the state of the country during the 
 present autumn and winter. It wonld have been one of rejoicing and con- 
 gratulation everywhere. Not because the bill included everybody and 
 satisfied everybody, but all working men would have felt that the barrier 
 created at the Reform Bill, if not absolutely broken down, was at least so 
 much lowered that the exclusion was much less general and less offensive. 
 You would have had this result, that we, the people in these islands, would 
 have been no longer two nations. We shoiild have felt more that hence- 
 forth we are one people. Every element of strength in the country would 
 have been immeasurably strengthened, and there would have been given 
 even to the humblest of the unenfranchised a feeling of hope which would
 
 75 
 
 have led him to believe in, and to strive after, something higher and better 
 than that to which he had hitherto been able to attain. Now, who prevented 
 this ? Surely we did not prevent it. We who thought we were speaking 
 for the general good of the people, we accepted the measure with an 
 honourable sincerity and fidelity. We said that it is good to the point to 
 which it steps forward. It is perfectly honest; it is no trick or subterfuge. 
 It will give satisfaction to some hundreds of thousands, and it will give that 
 which is as great a boon it will give hope to millions whom it does not 
 include and therefore, in perfect honourableness, we accepted that measure; 
 and who opposed it ? None other could effectually oppose it than Lord 
 Derby and the party of which he is the acknowledged and trusted leader. 
 They and he opposed and rejected that bill, and they and he are responsible 
 for what has been done since in the country as* a necessary and inevitable 
 consequence of that rejection. Lord Derby now stands nearest to the throne, 
 and 1 venture to say that he is now not a strength but a weakness to 
 that throne. By his conduct and by the conduct of his party, which he 
 adopts he thwarted at once the benevolent intentions of the Crown and 
 just expectations of the people. I confess that I am astonished at the 
 conduct of the Tory party in this matter. When the bill was introduced 
 into the House of Commons, it appeared to me to be the very last that any 
 statesmen with a spark of sense or honesty could offer any opposition to, and t 
 did not believe that on the other side of the House there was, I will say, if 
 you like, bitter partisanship or stupidity enough to induce them to fight a com- 
 bined battle with all who, would join them for the purpose of rejecting that 
 bill. Now, one would suppose that the present Government had troubles 
 enough on hand in what is called the sister country without urging the 
 people to excitement here. Ireland, as I have described it before Irish- 
 men, is the favoured field on which all the policy of the Tory party has 
 been exhibited, displayed, and tried. Well, in Ireland the Habeas Corpus 
 Act is suspended. Individual liberty, except by consent of the Executive, 
 i"3 abolished ; troops are pouring into the country ; ironclads, it is said, are 
 ordered to the coast to meet some, I hope and believe, imaginary foe and 
 the country gentlemen and their families are reported to be fleeing from their 
 ancestral homes to find refuge in garrison towns ; and all this is the magni- 
 ficent result of the policy of the party of which Lord Derby is the head and 
 hope. And now even, up to this very last session of Parliament, that party 
 had no remedy for this state of things but that ancient, and rude, and 
 savage remedy, the remedy of military force. But with all this in Ireland, 
 as I hope and believe, greatly exaggerated by some public writers, yet still 
 with enough to cause pain and anxiety, was that a judicious course for the 
 present party in power to create a great excitement in Great Britain ? I say 
 that Lord Derby, as the representative of his party in Parliament, is 
 himself the fomenter of discord, and that his party, and not our party, 
 is at this moment the turbulent element in English political society. 
 And let me tell this party I tell them nothing from this platform that 
 I have not told them upon the floor of the House of Commons let me 
 tell them that this question will not sleep. Some months ago there was a 
 remarkable convention held in Switzerland composed of men of eminence
 
 76 
 
 and character, by which an address or memorial TOM prepared and forwarded 
 to the Government of the United States, congratulating them upon the close 
 of their gigantic struggle, and upon the establishment of universal freedom 
 throughout the wide bounds of the republic. There was a passage in that 
 memorial, an expression of true philosophy and true statesmanship, to this 
 effect : "Unfinished questions have no pity for the repose of nations." That 
 referred to the great question of negro slavery ; but it is just as true when 
 it is applied to the question before us, where from five to six millions of 
 grown men in this United Kingdom, under a constitutional Government and 
 with a representative system, are shut out directly and purposely from that 
 constitution and representation. This great question which we are debating 
 to-night is au unfinished question, and, as the Swiss express it, it will have 
 no pity on the repose of this nation until it is a finished question. I observed 
 to-day, in a newspaper considered by some to be of great authority, that the 
 working men are supposed by what are called our betters for that paper 
 only writes for our betters they are supposed to have now done enough, 
 and they are exhorted by the very hand, probably, which during the whole 
 of the last session of Parliament was doing all it could against them to stand 
 still and wait for the action of Parliament. Well, but it is the same Parliament , 
 it is the same House of Commons which I left with sadness and apprehension 
 in July last. There are in it j^etthemen who, on our side of the House, betrayed 
 the cause which they were supposed to sit there to defend, and the only 
 change that we know of is, that the men who threw out with all terms of 
 ignominy the bill which we wished to pass last session, are now and will be 
 in February next if they do not break in pieces before they will be then 
 on the Treasury bench, and will take that leading and authoritative position 
 in the House which belongs to the Ministers of the Crown. Now, I differ 
 from this writer altogether ; I would not put any confidence in the course 
 to be taken by this House of Commons if I were a man unfranchised and 
 asking for a vote. I should like them to tell me that they had wholly 
 repented of the cheers with which they met all those vile and A'iolent impu- 
 tations upon your character. My opinion is this : that your duty, your 
 obvious duty a duty from which you cannot escape is to go on as you 
 have begun, to perfect in every part of the country your organisation in 
 favour of your enfranchisement. It is to bring every society with which 
 you are connected, to give itself for a time it will only l;e a short time to 
 the working out of your political redemption. I should advise you, whether 
 you are supporters of the Reform League in London, or are connected in any 
 way with the Reform Union of Manchester or any similar association, to 
 establish a system of small, but weekly or monthly contributions. Do not 
 allow my friend Mr. Bealcs or my ancient friend and political brother, Mr. 
 George Wilson, of Manchester do not allow them to want the means to 
 carry on and direct the great societies of which they are chiefs. And let me 
 beg of you, more than all else, to have no jealousies amongst each other. 
 Give our chairman his due ; give Mr. Ik-ales and the council their due ; give 
 every man who, with a single eye to this grcit question, is working zealously 
 in your cause, his due, and help in every way you can every honest endea- 
 vour to bring this grc at national question k> p-.;ch a solid and final issue,
 
 77 
 
 that it shall no longer disturb the repoaa of this nation. And lastly, I beg 
 of you to rise to something like a just contemplation of what the great 
 issue is for which you are contending. It is to make you citizens of one of 
 the noblest nations on the face of the earth, of a nation which has a grand 
 history in the past, and which I trust, and partly through your help, will 
 have a still grander history in the future. Let rne beg of you, then, and it is 
 the last word. I may speak to you to-night, that in all you do you may be 
 animated by a great and noble spirit, for you have set your hands and 
 hearts to a great and noble work. 
 
 AT a later period of the Meeting, on the motion for a vote of thanks 
 to the Chairman, Mr. Bright took occasion to express his dissent 
 from observations made by one of the speakers in reference to the 
 Queen. He spoke as follows : 
 
 1 rise for one moment before the vote of thanks is put. I need hardly 
 say that I entirely concur in it, and I hope it will receive the unanimous 
 support of the meeting; but I rise for the purpose of making in one sentence 
 a reference to a portion of the speech of one of the speakers, which I hope 
 I did not fully comprehend, but, if I did, in which I am totally unable to 
 concur. He made an allusion to the great meeting of yesterday, to the 
 assemblage in the park and the neighbourhood of the Palace. He also 
 made observations with regard to the Queen, which, in my opinion, no 
 meeting of people in this country, and certainly no meeting of Reformers, 
 ought to listen to with approbp.tion. Let it be remembered that there has 
 been no occasion on which any Ministry has proposed an improved repre- 
 sentation of the people when the Queen has not given her cordial, unhesitat- 
 ing, and, I believe, hearty assent. Let it be remembered, if there be now 
 at her side a Minister who is opposed to an improvement of the representa- 
 tion of the people, it is because, in obedience to well-known rules and con- 
 stitutional practice, the decision of the House of Commons on the bill of 
 last Session rendered it necessary for her to take the course which she then 
 did take. But the hou. gentleman referred further to a supposed absorption 
 of the sympathies of the Qiieen in grief for her late husband to the exclusion 
 of sympathy for and with the people. I am not accustomed to stand up in 
 defence of those who are possessors of crowns. But I could not sit here and 
 hear that observation without a sensation of wonder and of pain. I think 
 there has been by many persons a great injustice done to the Queen in 
 reference to her desolate and widowed position. And I venture to say this, 
 that a woman, be she the Queen of a great realm or the wif e of one of your 
 labouring men, who can keep alive in her heart a great sorrow for the lost 
 object of her life and her affections, is not at all likely to be wanting in a 
 great and generous sympathy with you. 
 
 JOHN HETWOOD, PKINTEE, 141 AND 143, DEANSGATE, MANCHESTER.

 
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