Mr. Bright's speech on Saturday was hardly up to his
highest level. Full alike of eloquence and of conviction, it was in passages, for the speech of a passed Cabinet Minister, too violent and undiscriminating. When Lord Hartington says Sir Stafford Northcote "has degraded finance," he utters a simple truth ; when Mr. Bright says the Chancellor of the Exchequer has been guilty of " thinible.rigging," he suggests a charge
which greatly exceeds the truth. Sir Stafford is in finance what a Basinghall-Street attorney is in the law, but is not a fraudulent practitioner. The advice, moreover, to Englishmen, if this Government continues, to emigrate to America or the South Pacific, smacks of an impatience which we lined, but which the statesman should help an audience to restrain. With this drawback, Mr.' Bright's exposure of the linger- ing desire of the Tories for Reciprocity was in his old and best style, as was his comparison of the late and present Governments in their internal administration, and his denunciation of the policy, "restless and wicked," pursued in three-quarters of the globe ; while in his peroration he rose once more to something of the old Hebrew grandeur, and thrilled his audience with the sketch of the man who, asking how England perished, was told that "wisdom and justice were scorned, and ignorance and passion and vainglory directed her policy and wielded her power." It is worse than that, for this Ministry is not vain- glorious, but stimulates the vainglory of the people, in order to retain its own power.
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