"THE LIFE OF JOHN BRIGHT."

New Zealand Herald, Volume L, Issue 15411, 20 September 1913, Page 4 (Supplement)

"THE LIFE OF JOHN BRIGHT."

THE ENGLISH REVIEW ON THE GREAT RADICAL. The English Review has a very notable article on Mr. Trevelyan's " Life of John Bright" (Constable, London). It says that the author has a hearty admiration for Bright, makes the utmost of the many respectable and creditable things he did, and has the greatest difficulty in finding that he was ever in the wrong, which he was, not infrequently, through the perverse limitation of his outlook. How could a man really understand England who regarded with mere resentment and disgust half the formative and controlling elements in the life ofßritain, the Church, the landed interest, the whole aristocratic and country gentleman "class, the army, the navy, the colonies, the universities, the public schools, not to mention the whole body of those whom he lumped together as the " Tories." Nor does it appear that he had much real acquaintance with the working masses, or a genuine sympathy with their aims and sentiments, though he had a kindly desire that they should get enough to eat and drink, and be well clothed and provided, with cheap books as well as cheap boots. He \poke of himself at times as a democrat; but his democracy manifested itself chiefly in a great dislike to lords and bishops and other socially-privileged persons. And no doubt there was still plenty to be done between the 'thirties and the 'seventies in sweeping away privileges and inequalities of all kinds, from the pocket boroughs and the Corn Laws to the theological tests for degrees at Oxford. The Manchester men were splendid for this sort of work, and Bright was the best of all; for here, at any rate, he embodied popular aspirations, he really did represent the awakened democracy of the great industrial towns in their revolt against aristocratic and territorial feudalism, and the influence of London society, and he could express what they felt with poetic and prophetic fervour. The passion which had been simmering in the breasts of the British middle classes, Puritans, Nonconformists, Quakers, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, through a century and a half of Anglican, Whiggish, and oligarchical predominance, found voice when John Bright set the trumpet to his lips and blew. He was the inspired preacher of a people who, be it remembered, had been trained by six generations of sermons, whose only literature had been that authorised version of the Bible which Bright knew by heart, whose only real conception of a hero was that of an idol-breaker. Bright was always, breaking idols, constantly (at least, in the best and most fruitful part of his career) calling upon the Lord to shatter false gods, denouncing the golden calves and the graven images of the heathen who worshipped at % the altars of protection, militarism, franchise monopoly. He was the apostle of that triumphant, middle-class Protestantism which at length had its" revenge in the nineteenth century for the persecutions of the seventeenth, and the social intolerance and political proscriptions of the eighteenth. It leaped into the saddle, rejoicing exceedingly over its own achievements, and no doubt honestly believing that it had emancipated the people from the fetters of the ages by the process of giving free rein to the individualistic spirit. What it did not see, or preferred not to recognise, was that this aggravated individualism was particularly advantageous to its own class, and of very much smaller value to any other. Bright, with all his kindliness and charity, never really seems to have suspected that there was anything fundamentally wrong in the organisation of society as it prevailed at Rochdale. That a few capitalists and manufacturers should roll up the,V fortunes year by year, while the bulk of the industrial population toiled on for a little more than a bare subsistence, did not strike him as an unnatural or apparently an undesirable arrangement, provided that the toilers got their food cheap and were allowed to "better themselves" if they could. Tnav they never would substantially better themselves by free and open competition in the labour market did not occur to him; still less that an educated proletariat endowed with political jxiwer would speedily seek for itsef a larger' share of the amenities, and even the luxuries, of life which were showered upon other classes. This was the cause of Bright's quarrel with the Chartists, then with the Young Engenders and Conservative reformers who got the Factory Acts through in the teeth of his opposition, and finally with the latter-day Liberals of his old" age, from whom he became widely estranged. There was more vision and insight into the con-dition-of-England question in Disraeli's "Sybil" than in all Bright's speeches; and if Bright ,had lived down to the twentiest century era he would probably have found salvation beside Lord Cromer and

Lord Courtney, perhaps in the same august assembly which they adorn. Indeed, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's famous dictum about the thirteen millions on the verge of starvation is in itself a condemnation, which Bright himself would never have uttered, of the middle-class Parliamentarians who had in the main ruled England for the previous 60 years. Nor did Bright properly grasp the situation of Britain in the international sphere. He saw that the Crimean War was a foolish blunder, and he had the courage to say so in despite of public opinion; he knew that there was ' a great deal of mere frothy confusion in the whole Palmerstonian foreign policy. But he was too ignorant of history, and too contemptuous of its lessons, to understand that an Island State, dependent for its very existence on commerce and imported food, could not survey the international chessboard with serene indifference. The Manchester school would have been invincible if all the world had been like Manchester, which was far from being the case. But it had its place in the evolution of modern English society and politics, bridging over the gap between the breakdown of oligarchical government and the era of reconstruction on a genuine democratic basis. Bright was its most remarkable figure, personally an estimable man, brave, honourable, virtuous, and with a fine old English passion for ' righteousness. Mr. Trevelyan has done him a little more than justice; but his biography is a skilful piece of work, smoothly written and carefully "documented," and it is a living, wellmodelled portrait of the great orator of the older Radicalism that we get from his pages. !