2 FEBRUARY 1867, Page 1

In the magnificent effort of oratory reviewing his own political

career, delivered in the Rochdale Theatre last Wednesday, Mr. Bright passed in review his conduct on the Corn Laws, the Game Laws, the " taxes on knowledge," the Irish question, the Reform

question, and the Indian question, and found that on all he had maintained " that the law and the administration of the law should regard with just and equal eye all classes of the people, and that to all questions of government, all great national questions, we should bring to bear those simple and sublime principles, the high and everlasting principles of a pure morality, which we derive, or ought to derive, from the religion which we profes.i." Mr. Bright, we sincerely believe, does not overpraise himself when he says this, widely as we differ from many of his modes of applying these principles,—except on one point. Surely he never in his life ever tried to forgive his political enemies. " Miserable writers and speakers of a miserable and hateful faction,"—such is his descrip- tion, in this very speech, of his Tory foes. Is that description of them an expression of " sublime and pure morality ?" And yet this language is certainly the key to the enigma he seemed to worry himself about, as to the reason of the abuse which is so- lavishly poured upon him. When a man heavily inveighs against a class, the class very naturally heavily inveighs against him in return, and being more numerous, manages to outdo him in invective ; all of which invective, being convergent on one point, while the invective on a class scatters, as it were, in the air, produces the more striking effect which so much amazes Mr.. Bright's imagination. We wonder that a man of such extra- ordinary imaginative power should not see the falsehood in alL sweeping reprobation,—and at all events that, if he does not, he should not accept the destiny of being a mark for invective in his- turn with greater equanimity.