With such overwhelming aid, Lord Russell and his exploring party were enabled to penetrate the dense forest of protection, and reach the roots of the huge and rank old tree, which not merely overshadowed the rich soil of their native land, but spread its branches over their seaports, so as to prevent the importation from other lands of articles necessary for their existence. They saw that, under its shadow, no herbs grew except such as, from their position, were favoured by a ray of the hazy sunlight of protection; healthy shrubs, luxuriant in their nature, withered and decayed wherever its branches extended. [Sidenote: Richard Cobden and the Anti-Corn-Law League] The chief of the new class of politicians, who had arisen was no common man: he was one whose clear judgment, while it embraced existing wants, penetrated far into the future. Richard Cobden, the son of a Sussex yeoman, and, practically, one of themselves, who had been trained to commerce,[32] saw perhaps more clearly than any one else the pernicious effects of all protective laws. Supported by an overwhelming array of facts, he arranged them in a manner so clear, and made them known in so pleasing and homely a style of eloquence, as to command attention and carry conviction to every man who was open to reason. In a word, he was the first to thoroughly convince the people of Great Britain that they had a _right_ to be allowed to purchase the necessaries of life wherever they could obtain them, and to dispose of their manufactures wherever they could sell them, on the most advantageous terms. [Sidenote: John Bright.]