BOOKS.

MR. BRIGHT'S SPEECHES.* Tug republication of these speeches is meant to vindicate Mr. Bright's sagacity as a statesman, as much as to perpetuate his fame as an orator. It will doubtless effect both ends ; but Mr. Rogers would have done better, for both the objects he had in view, if he had republished more of the fine set of speeches by which Mr. Bright first became known to the English fiublic,—those on Free Trade,—of which he has only given us a single specimen, and that, though a fine one, by no means the most characteristic and the most impressive. This seems to us the only signal error in the selection. We cannot help regretting too,—though we suppose it would have been beneath the conventional dignity of such a work to embody them,—those parenthetical notes by which the readers of the news- paper reports learn the effect of Mr. Bright's irony, and invective, and fervour of appeal, upon his various audiences. Nothing could be of more interest to us of modern times than to have an edition of the speeches of Demosthenes or of the Gracchi in which such indications of the success of the orator should be contained. Is it not a pity that in mere deference to the conventions of lite- rary dignity, the editor should have suppressed facts which add greatly to the life of the speech and the interest of the reader ?

• Speeches on Questions qf Public Policy. By John Bright, M.P. Edited by James E. Thorold Rogers. 2 vols. London : Macmillan.

Were our newspaper reporters to omit systematically these explana- tions of the temper of the audience, the outcry of the public would soon compel their restoration. The truth is that more than one- half of the moral picture which any great speech calls up before the mind consists in the response of the audience to its appeal, or the failure in response. To give us a great speech without the popular echo, is not unlike turning a dramatic dialogue into a broken soliloquy by suppressing all parts but one. With these exceptions, of which the first is a substantial criticism and the latter only a question of taste, we may say that these two volumes contain a very fine and minute picture alike of Mr. Bright's political capacities and of his oratorical powers.

Mr. Bright said in his speech on Tuesday at Edinburgh that elo- quence consists according to Milton and according to himself in the "serious and hearty love of truth." We have no doubt that true elo- quence is utterly inconsistent with the least trace of insincerity, but a less fortunate definition of its source, or one less applicable to his own case, Mr. Bright could scarcely have hit upon. That he loves truth heartily we do not doubt at all. But in this he is, we suspect, scarcely the equal of many indefinitely less eloquent men ;—of the late Sir Coruowall Lewis, perhaps, who did not know what eloquence meant, and of many others who never infected one other mind with a single spark of their own earnestness. In- deed, it is in speeches of what we may call intellectual investi- gation that Mr. Bright fails most completely. What, then, is the impression which these speeches will leave on those who study them without relation to the passions of the hour? The impression,

we think, of a mind of immense solidity, of large sagacity, of those emphatically popular but vehement and immovable prepos-

sessions which sagacity, as distinguished from reasonableness, usually implies ; of a mind excessively impatient of hostile argu- ment, and full of that scorn for hostile argument which, by making it seem mere cavil, is far more powerful, especially when expressed

on the popular side, than the most triumphant refutation ; of a mind which translates every political abstraction into a living

picture presented to the imagination ; of a mind well stored with noble wrath against the selfish aristocracies of the world, but far less apt to feel and pour out that wrath against the sinners who are not representatives of class - privilege, but only of that

universal selfishness or greed which is of all classes alike ; in a word, of a mind steeped in groat resentments against the sins

of privileged classes, and gifted with unrivalled powers for painting what it feels, but yet failing in the appreciation of any political truths which need either great moral flexibility or great intellectual impartiality to appreciate and enforce aright.

Nothing is more remarkable than the political solidity of Mr. Bright's mind. He never seems to alter his moral attitude from the first speech in these volumes to the latest. Hostile argument or menace only brings out this solidity. There is not a quiver of uncertainty, not a shadow of doubt passing across his mind, in the face of the most strenuous and daunting opposition. He does not even seem to need to rally his force against the storm. In the darkest hour of the American struggle Mr. Bright spoke with as much self-possessed scorn of the statesmen who were affirming on all sides the inevitable necessity of recognizing the South, as if he had felt,—doubtless he did feel,—the rock beneath his feet, and saw the quagmire on which his opponents were treading. The last character the poet Keble meant to draw in the following verse was that of the great Quaker Democrat ; yet we never think of Mr. Bright's attitude in one or two political conflicts of recent years without recalling the lines,—

" That is the heart for thoughtful seer

Watching in trance 'nor dark nor clear' The appalling Future as it nearer draws ; His spirit calmed the storm to meet, Feeling the rock beneath his feet, And tracing through the cloud tho eternal Cause."

Surely, even on the highest side of them, these lines repre- sent something of the religious trust which Overrules and calms Mr. Bright's noblest political passions. Is there anything much nobler delineated in Keble's lines than is indicated in the following close to Mr. Bright's speech against Mr. Roebuck's motion for recognizing the South ?-

"We know tho cause of this revolt, its purposes, and its aims. Those who made it have not left us in darkness respecting their inten- tions, but what they are to accomplish is still hidden from our sight ; and I will abstain now, as I ha re always abstained with regard to it, from predicting what is to come. I know what I hope for,—and what I shall rejoice in,—but I know nothing of future facts that will enable me to express a confident opinion. Whether it will give freedom to the race which white men have trampled in the dust, and whether the issue will purify a nation steeped in crimes committed against that race, is known only to the Supreme. In Hie hands are alike the breath of man

and the life of States. I am willing to commit to Him the issue of this dreaded [2 dread] contest ; but I implore of Him, and I beseech this House, that my country may lift nor hand nor voice in aid of the moat stupendous act of guilt that history has recorded in the annals of mankind."

Again, before the first great step had been gained in the war,—un- less, indeed, the occupation of New Orleans were the first great step, —long before the battle of Gettysburg and the surrender of Vicks- burg,—while the stoutest hearts were failing them for fear, and the sea and waves of sympathy with the Southern dominion were roar- ing with a voice which drowned all other sounds in English poli- ties, Mr. Bright could smite down an English politician,—the then Irish Secretary, Sir Robert Peel, —who advocated the recognition of the South with these calm, scornful, massive words :—

" The other day, not a week since, a member of the present Govern- ment—ho is not a statesman—he is the son of a great statesman—and occupies the position of Secretary for Ireland,—he dared to say to an English audience that he wished the Republic to ho divided, and that the South should become an independent State. If that island which—

suppose in punishment for some of its offences—has been committed to his care,—if that island were to attempt to secede, not to set up a slave kingdom, but a kingdom more free than it has over yet been, the Government of which he is a member would sack its cities and drench its soil with blood before they would allow such a kingdom to be established."

What strength of immovable contempt for a degenerate son there is in the terse sarcasm, " he is not a statesman,—he is the son of a great statesman," and what graphic irony in the delineation of the fate which would be in reserve for Ireland, if Ireland should dare, with a far less ignoble cause, to follow the example of the South ! It is this absolute fixity of Mr. Bright's attitude, supported as it is by broad popular sympathies, which gives him half his influence and more than half his eloquence. Other men are impressed for a moment by that which makes no impres- sion upon him ; they shift their position to meet it ; they enter into its intellectual meaning ; they combat it on its own ground. He stands where he is, without shifting a muscle ; he does not attempt to meet it on its own ground ; he holds fast on his, and if it comes within his reach mites it with his heavy mace, —if not, smiles at it with an irony which leads every one to suppose that it is self-condemned in not meeting him on the ground of his own choosing.

And Mr. Bright's tactics are precisely the same, whether the ground on which he stands is really a great faith or a passionate prejudice. Look at his speech at Birmingham the other day against the only true democratic principle,—the only principle

which, if we had, as we shall one day, perhaps not so far off, have, equal electoral districts, could secure the nation any true repre- sentation at all,--the principle now known as the representation

of minorities,—and remark how totally devoid of argument, or the vestige of argument, we may even say the capacity for argument, it is, and yet how effective. It is, in fact, the absence of the capacity

for argument that makes it effective. Mr. Bright, as his custom is, does not alter his own intellectual posture one hair's breadth to meet his opponents. He merely scoffs at them for not presenting an argument that he can grasp,—with a grand assumption that no argument which does not touch him can have virtue in it.

It is just the same with the speech in these volumes on the same topic. No argument lie could possibly have used would have had half the effect of the following sarcasm :—

"What you are wanting to do is a thing which is absurd upon the face of it. You take a constituency which has always hitherto been held to be a united and compact body, and you propose that it should return two voices at one election, and that by an arrangement ordered not by this House, but recommended by the other House of Parliament, this constituency is to speak in two voices—one end of the constituency shall be allowed to say this, and the other end shall be allowed to say that. There are jugglers whom we have seen exhibiting their clever tricks—pouring out port, champagne, milk and water, from one and the same bottle. The proposal resembles this. The scheme is, that an electoral body, by a peculiar contrivance hitherto unknown, and I will undertake to say, if ever hoard of, only despised, shall not be asked, but shall be made to do this—to return two Members to sit on this side and one on the other, or vice versii."

No argument could possibly equal the popular effect of this sturdy refusal to argue, this branding of the device the orator objected to as a juggler's trick for pouring out strong wine, and milk and

water from the same bottle. Like the remarkable passage in his Irish speech of last session about the Buckinghamshire empiric mentioned in Addison's Spectator, who had a pill which was very good to pre- vent earthquakes, this simile of Mr. Bright's did service for much reasoning. And this constitutes the great strength of Mr. Bright's irony,—that it could scarcely be used by any man who had ever had even a casual and momentary suspicion that his opponents haa anything to say for themselves. It represents the bitter

protest of a powerful nature, unvisited and unvisitable by a doubt, against a repulsive suggestion, assumed, because it is repulsive, to be intolerable and unjust. And even when his scorn

is directed not so much at the views of his opponents as at their persons, how strongly scornful it is,—how completely he makes

you feel the long-cherished contempt which belongs to his attitude of mind ! In the debate on the Ecclesiastical Titles' Bill in 1851, Mr. Bright wanted to make Lord John Russell feel the con- tempt with which he viewed the divided counsels and disorganized ranks of the Liberal party, and expressed it after this fashion :—

" It has been said, Malta) torricolis linguos, coslestibus una.' But it does not appear that the Celestials in this House are more agreed about the matter than any of those who feel littlo regard for Protestantism or Catholicism. If the noble lord cannot show a united Cabinet or party —if out of doors nobody is in favour of the Bill, and the press is almost unanimously against it—it is a fair ground for asking the House to proceed no further with the measure."

"The Ccelestials" ! Could scorn for the Treasury Bench have been more powerfully expressed?

Mr. Rogers has, rather diplomatically, suppressed the traces of Mr. Bright's resistance to the Ten Hours' Bill ; but he has inserted a speech, which strikes us as by no means a wise one, on the Education question in 1847, — a speech which repre- sented Mr. Bright's jealousy, shared of course with the Non- conformists generally, not merely of the supposed partiality of the Government for the Established Church, but of the inter- ference of Government with the education of the people at all. And Mr. Rogers has inserted another speech in favour of the abolition of capital punishment which is singularly expressive of the intellectual deficiencies of Mr. Bright as an argumenta- tive speaker. In fact, that speech starts from the assumption,— entirely undiscus.sed, —that there is something necessarily brutalizing and cruel in capital punishment, and this without reference to the discrimination with which it may be used, and that imprisonment for life is obviously a more merciful and not less effectually pre- ventive punishment than death,—which premisses being granted, it scarcely needs either Mr. Bright's vigorous expressions of dislike for capital sentences, or anything else, to lead to a final judgment.

The breadth of Mr. Bright's sagacity and the marvellous force of his eloquence are alike due to the deeply rooted sym- pathies with the popular csuse which have moulded his whole life. Wherever more than these are wanted, wherever it is essential,—on account of the divided feeling of the people at large, or of any accidental failure of sympathy on his part with the classes chiefly interested in any reform,—to support his view with an intellectual reply that shows a clear and full appreciation of the opposite case, he seems to us to fail. He failed thus on the Ten Hours' Bill ; he failed thus on the Education question ; and he fails thus on the question of capital punishment. On all these subjects he had not the same deep popular sympathy at his back, while his intellectual view was poor and inadequate. His rather obsolete jealousy of Government action—even when Government is a true representative of the whole nation,—may yet embarrass him as a Minister.

Nothing is a more curious symptom of the popular instinct

of Mr. Bright's oratory than his evident attachment to the Throne, in spite of his undisguised admiration for the American Republic. He has a deep sense of the advantage which his affection for the Throne gives him in his battle against the privileged aristocracy. People plus throne have far more chance against the aristocracy than people against the aristocracy plus the throne. That is part of his feeling. But beyond that,

there is what we may call a real touch of popular admiration for popular thrones, — that sort of admiration which probably results from the imaginative pleasure in the historical person- ality, so to say, given by such thrones to national life and action, from the individual colour thus gained for history, nay, even from the mere outwardly majestic aspect,—even though this outwardly majestic aspect be only symbolic, —which is thereby secured as the drapery of political machinery. Mr. Bright has shown this leaning to the throne more than once. When Mr. Ayrton sneered at the Queen for not being present to see the Working Men's Reform demonstration in the streets of London, he was rebuked by Mr. Bright, who claimed for the Queen her right to indulge the one deep domestic sorrow of her life, in words at once eloquent and loyal. Much earlier than this, and long before he could have in any way anticipated office, he ended one of his finest speeches on Reform by saying that reform would "confer a lustre which time could never dim on that benignant reign under which we have the happiness to live." Nor is it only to

&OA monarchy that his imagination clings so long as mogarohy

is "benignant." We remember his ending the finest of his Free Trade speeches,—which we have never seen since then, and which we wish Mr. Rogers had reproduced for us,—by reminding his audience of those words "which Royal lips had uttered on divine authority, that the poor shall not always be forgotten, that the patient abiding of the meek shall not perish for ever." Mr. Bright's imaginative instinct as an orator is not republican. The longing for institutions at once popular and "august," runs through his speeches. And in this we have no doubt that he reflects truly the popular instincts of English life.