MR. BRIGHT ON THE AMERICAN WAR.
IT is not too much to say that if Mr. Bright could be suddenly transformed into a statesman, the cause of true liberty would gain as much as it lost by the coup d'Etat of December, 1852. At least the second speaker in the House, he is almost the only man among us who gives the impression of force, of a strength not derived from adventitious circumstances, but flowing outward from genuine mental power. Most of our politicians are buffers, while he is a locomotive. The mis- direction of his strength sometimes blinds men to its reality, for even an engine cannot seem strong while engaged in stopping a train but it exists nevertheless, and should it ever again take the true direction, would increase all exist- ing forces almost indefinitely. We hardly know, for example, what strength it might not add to our councilp were Mr. Bright to see that the extension of the French Empire is the extension of despotism, that a war may be just and holy though waged for no selfish motive, that it is right as well as expedient sometimes to do battle for the weak,-that a nation, as well as a man, needs, with trouble at hand, to be put in what athletes call condition. At present Mr. Bright simply wastes his strength in making the expression of those convictions, which he cannot root out, or even greatly affect, slow and inoperative. There is no danger, for example, of France taking peaceful possession of Sardinia, but if Mr. Bright were urging resistance instead of submission, there would be no danger of her making the attempt.
It is, therefore, with no common pleasure that we recog- nize any evidence of more statesmanlike views on the part of the member for Birmingham, any proof of moderation in maintaining his special doctrines, any acknowledgment that circumstances may arise in which his rules must be over- ridden by higher and nobler principles of action. Such an evidence is, we think, offered in his speech to the electors of South Lancashire on the American war. If there ever was a war we might expect Manchester men to denounce, it is the civil war in America. It injures every interest they are concerned in, and affronts every belief they have loved to insist on. One side in the contest is held by their customers, the other by those who supply the material for their wares. The war is already telling on the export of Manchester goods, while it wholly prohibits the import of the Manchester neces- sity. It is a war, too, which by the very fact of its occur- rence cuts off their most popular topic of declamation. It is useless to talk any more of the peacefulness of republics, of the democratic hatred of violence, or the American love of economy. The great Republic is raising an army as fast as an Austrian Cabinet, incurring a national debt with more than English insouciance, and appealing to physical force more readily than the author of the coup d'Etat. So sensitive are the party to these facts, that for months they have kept an almost resentful silence ; they helped to forbid the discussion of American events in the House of Commons, and they did not even talk of America in the annual debate on the ballot-box. Their leader might well have been expected to be sore, to denounce angrily the Press which has roused his pets to a frenzy of indignation, and the Cabinet which has led on a race " so thoroughly educated" to exact reparation by means other than argument. Mr. Bright does nothing of the kind. Whether his heart is touched by the fact that the slaves are the stake in the contest, or whether he simply sees in the Southern slave-owners a genuine aristocracy, he does not attempt to explain. Indeed he hides up the sources of his opinions under cloud of bits from American letters, as if any con- 4%eivable correspondent, or any mass of opinion, however honestly expressed, had ever affected his mind. But his view of the war is as clear as its cause is obscure, and it is emphatically the view of the Nortli,—its view upon both the issues the South has chosen to raise. Mr. Bright will have no "slave empire." He is not blind, if his followers are, to the dangers which menace the supply of cotton. Indeed, he rather rates them for folly in talking so much about supply and demand, and "childishly arguing from past events, which were not a bit like this, to the event now passing before our eyes." But in spite of cotton, of half-time in Lancashire, and of all the evils a short supply may bring on our northern hive, he still holds that the act of 1834 was a great act, and "that those who passed it can have no sym- pathy for those who wish to build up a great empire on the perpetual bondage of their fellow men. ' Nor is this all. Mr. Bright might have been expected by men who have still some hope that he loves liberty as well as commercial profits, to speak, if he spoke at all, in defence of the slave. But he allows that slavery is not all ; that the Union, by "every principle upon which States are governed," has a right to maintain its own existence by force ; that the Government of Washington have just the same right to coerce the South back to allegiance that England would have to coerce York- shire or Lancashire if either set up for itself. The bitterest Northerner could not put the case more strongly than the man who has hitherto been the advocate of peace at any price, and was supposed to believe at least in the right of insurrection. We only wish we could hope that Mr. Bright would see the force of his own admissions. If it be right for a Government to engage in civil war sooner than see a slave empire called into being, surely it is right to engage in foreign war sooner than see a single despotism slowly absorb half Europe. If there are causes other than self-defence which justify war, political freedom and the safety of Europe may reasonably be counted as one. If it is right for Americans to arm, in order "to sustain the Government, and sustain the authority of a great nation," it is right for Englishmen to arm for that identical end. Or are we, in Mr. Bright's eyes, only a little nation, with no right to defend our greatness from the Jefferson Davis, who, with an imperial title, glances askance at it from the south of our Potomac ? If Mr. Bright would but see that the honour he so jealously defends in America is as worthy of defence in his own land, there is not a man in England whose aid Englishmen would more gladly accept. We want leaders of the Bright stamp to give bone to our aristocracy; and it is with a double regret that we see force, which would double our speed, wasted in. the vain attempt to turn us out of the groove.
At home this speech is a surprise, and abroad it will be wholly beneficial. It will teach the South, if anything will, that they lean on a broken reed ; that cotton is not king, even in its own capital ; that the heart of the nation cannot yet be crushed down by threats addressed to its pocket. In the centre of cotton districts, amidst a people who live by cotton, the man who of all others upholds the cotton inte- rest, still tells them that there are things nobler than cotton, that he will not support a profitable system of crime, that to break the blockade would be an injustice, and that Eng- land, if she acts at all, ought to act on her conscience, and not on the return of her cotton-mills. The South has laughed at the philanthropists, and has yet to learn that in England they do but exaggerate the permanent belief of the tradesman.
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