Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 09: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great ReformersHubbard, Elbert
History
Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 09: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers
Hubbard, Elbert
Reformers
The plan never materialized. John and Elizabeth journeyed together for
two years, and then she died and was buried in her wedding-dress,
holding a spray of syringa in her stiff, blue-veined hands.
John Bright had arranged to have the funeral very simple in all its
arrangements--all quite Quaker-like. He himself was going to make a
little speech, telling how the Voice had said to him that death was as
natural as life, and perhaps just as good, and that she who was dead
had no fear of death, but greeted it as an imitation, her only care
being for the living.
But John Bright did not make the speech. He held in his arms his
motherless baby girl, a little over a year old, and the baby laughed
and pulled his hair in childish glee, and John Bright, groping for
words, found them not. He took his seat, dumb. A Quakeress arose, a
worker in the mills, and made the speech which he had intended to
give--perhaps she made a better one.
John Bright had only turned thirty, but he thought that life for him
was then and thereafter but a blank. He did not realize that whether
death is an initiation for the dead or not, it surely is for the
living. To stand by an open grave and behold the sky shut down on less
worth in the world is a milestone--an epoch.
A month of dumb, dragging, bitter grief followed, and Richard Cobden
came up from Manchester to visit his friend. Cobden had a message for
Bright. It was this: "Grief hugged to the heart is a kind of selfish
joy. To live is to think, to work, to act. At this moment thousands of
women and children are starving in England--absolutely perishing for
lack of bread. Come with me and help remove the tax that places food
out of the reach of many. Transmute grief for the dead into love for
the living. Let us never rest until the Corn Laws are abolished--
Come!" To dedicate himself to humanity now seemed easy for John
Bright. This he did, and life took on a great, quiet sanctity,
purified and refined by death.
The baby girl grew into beautiful womanhood. She is now a grandmother
with children grown, and true to tradition, as became the daughter of
her father, she made herself notorious for the many and famous for the
few, by heading an appeal to Parliament in favor of woman suffrage.
For the same cause comes Mrs. Cobden-Sanderson, daughter of Richard
Cobden, and spends four months in jail for insisting that her
political preferences shall be officially recorded. We do move that
precious slow!
* * * * *
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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