WHAT THEY SAY OF MR. BRIGHT.
AS Mr. Bright lies ill at Rochdale, the talk of his career is very naturally both vivid and controversial. All Englishmen have a pride in Mr. Bright,—even those who during the earlier part of his life regarded him as their political leader ; and it is these who are most anxious, as he lies on his bed of sickness, to find some political excuse for what they regard as his recent sad political shortcomings. Accordingly, what these loyal-hearted Radicals oenerally say of him is usually apologetic, and takes the °form of regret that with his health, his political nerve should have broken down. Ali !' they say, if Mr. Bright had not lost tone and hope as his strength has ebbed away, we should never have had him deserting Mr. Gladstone on the Irish Question. He was the leader of the Liberals in relation to Ireland once. How grand were his speeches when the old Whig Coercion Bills were introduced, and Mr. Bright used to deplore the failure to treat Ireland from an Irish point of view, and to tell the world that " Force is no remedy " ! It was Mr. Bright who, first of our English statesmen, understood that the agrarian question was the critical question in Ireland, and that the tenant- farmers must be protected against the rack-renting of the landlords. It was Mr. Bright, too, who saw that to enlarge the peasant-proprietary class in Ireland is the only security for political stability, and who not only carried the clauses in the Church Disestablishment Act which have worked so well in that direction, but who would have embodied the same principle on a much greater scale in the Irish Land Act of 1881, had not his health broken down. It is easy to see that it was the same misfortune in a somewhat different form which robbed Ire- land of his invaluable help in 1886. When Mr. Gladstone took the Irish bull by the horns in his seventy-seventh year, Mr. Bright, though he was only in his seventy-fifth, had not the elasticity left in him to venture on the great enterprise. We cannot blame him for it. Who is there with Mr. Gladstone's grand confidence in the laws of equity and the magic of disinterested good-will ? Still, to us it seems the saddest thing in the world that the close of so great a career, a career of such masculine, sturdy, and sterling Liberalism, should have been overshadowed by this failure in physical vitality to renew the springs of his ancient courage. It is a sad irony of destiny by which the great tribune of the people has been not only outstripped by a converted Tory, or, if you please, a developed Peelite, but outstripped in that very political enterprise to which, but for Mr. Bright's sagacity, the Grand Old Man might never have directed his versatile genius.' Such are the lamenta- tions which Home-rulers now pronounce over Mr. Bright, as they read the bulletins from One Ash, and shake their heads over their inability to say of the old hero what they would like to have said of him, and what they would have said, if he had still been at the head of their own ranks.
Perhaps, however, their regret has a dash of uneasiness in it. Perhaps they have some dim suspicion of what to us, at all events, seems plain enough,—that it is not Mr. Bright who has changed his attitude as a Liberal, but they who have changed theirs. Mr. Bright, with all his Liberalism, has always been one who chose to move along the old lines. He disliked the "fancy franchises." He disliked the "minority" representation. He detests the cumu- lative vote. He distrusted all the subtleties of John Stuart Mill's doctrine. He has never taken to female suffrage, in spite of strong family influences that might have caused him to swerve in that direction. He has been conservative in the form of his Liberalism, even when he has been most eloquent in defence of his faith. He was a great Indian reformer before the Mutiny, but he declined to weaken the hands of the Government by resisting the requisite measures for putting the Mutiny down, at the moment when England's empire in India seemed to be trembling in the balance. Mr. Bright can never forget that he is an Englishman. He cherishes the deepest possible loyalty both to the Constitution and the Empire. Though in theory a Republican, he has often lent the Queen the support of his personal fidelity and admiration. He loves to go forward, but he loves to go forward in the old paths. He cannot endure transforma- tion scenes, and evidently feels that they are appropriate only to political pantomime. Above all, he believes in Parliamentary methods, and dreads anything that will weaken the authority of the Parliament we know. He declines to set up in its place some new-fangled equivalent for it that we do not know. His sympathy for the Irish Party was great so long as the Irish Party pursued Parliamentary methods. But the moment it began to threaten the authority of Parliament, Mr. Bright's wrath rose against it. He felt then that it was endangering something even greater than the welfare of Ireland,— the welfare of the United Kingdom and of the Empire. He became more and more convinced of this when he saw the knot of men for some of whose proposals he had struggled so hard, doing all in their power, in 1881, to defeat the very cause. of which he himself had raised the standard, lest justice to Ireland. should undermine the influence of the agitators. Mr. Bright saw in that absolute indifference to any kind of Irish or British prosperity unaccompanied by something like repeal of the Union, an omen that warned him against the Parnellite group. Paralyse Parliament to gain any object, however desirable, and the object gained would have been bought at too costly a price. Irish content secured by Parliamentary wisdom was one thing ; Irish independence purchased at the price of Parliamentary weakness, quite another, and, in Mr. Bright's opinion, a very mischievous thing. He saw in every move of the Parnellite Party a complete indifference to any end except the temporary success of their own agitation, and he did not believe that even that agitation could obtain any but temporary success, if it were to march over a prostrate House of Commons in order to win it. Ireland might in that way gain a miserable independence ; but if she had struck a deadly blow at Great Britain in gaining it, it would do her no good, but bring her to ruin sooner even than the country she had succeeded in humiliating. Moreover, Mr. Bright saw that all his oldest convictions, his conviction of the immeasurable worth of honest toil, and again of the vast importance of securing the free exchange of the products of honest toil, were wholly incon- sistent with the methods which the Parnellites had adopted. They paralysed industry ; they restricted liberty ; they put an embargo on free exchange. They protected the indo- lent and wasteful tenant, and would not permit him to make way for the enterprising and frugal tenant. - They encouraged plotting and discouraged plodding. They sowed discord, and gave new vitality to the terror by night instead of to industry by day. They did all in their power to discredit the Magistrates and the Courts of Justice, and to stimulate social suspicion instead of bracing individual courage and independence. Now, all these methods of action were odious to Mr. Bright, and were, in his belief, fatal to the manliness of the Irish character, which, as he has always held, has had more to do with Irish prosperity than even low rents and peasant- properties themselves. Consequently, he saw with grief and amazement that revolution in the mind of his great col- league which reconciled Mr. Gladstone to all these methods, and substituted feeble excuses for " exclusive dealing," for the manly invective against " marching through rapine to disintegration," of which these excuses so suddenly took the place. Surely it is not Mr. Bright who has changed his attitude. He is the old Mr. Bright still, the Mr. Bright of the Anti-Corn-Law League, the Mr. Bright who has always desired to enlarge the political greatness of the House of Commons by increasing the popular fprce which it expresses and the weight of character which it represents. The present Mr. Bright is the old Mr. Bright, and the cause of Unionism which he represents is the cause with which, as an Irish reformer, he long ago identified himself.
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