Modern Leaders: Being a Series of Biographical SketchesMcCarthy, Justin
History
Modern Leaders: Being a Series of Biographical Sketches
McCarthy, Justin
Biography
of their chiefs, the Marquis of Salisbury (then in the House of Commons
as Lord Cranbourne) had the spirit and sense to express openly and
loudly his anger and disgust at the vulgar and brutal behaviour of some
of his followers. Therefore Mr. Mill ceased to be interrupted; but he is
not much listened to. That supreme, irrefutable evidence that a man
fails to interest the House--the fact that a hum and buzz of
conversation may be heard all the time he is speaking--is always fatally
manifest when Mr. Mill addresses the Commons. But the House, after all,
is only a platform from which a man endeavors to speak to the country,
and if Mill does not always get the ear of the House, he never fails to
be heard by the nation. I have no doubt that even the Tory members of
the House read Mill's speeches when they appear in print; assuredly all
intelligent Tories do. These speeches, in any case, are never lost on
the country. They form at once a part of the really successful
literature of each session. They always excite controversy of some
kind--not even the great orations of Bright and Gladstone are more
talked of.
So far they are a success, and there is something in the personal
character of Mr. Mill himself, which makes him specially popular with
the working classes of England. I doubt if there is now any Englishman
whose name would be received with a more cordial outburst of applause at
a popular meeting. Working-men, in fact, are very proud of Mr. Mill's
scholarship, culture, and profundity. They can perceive easily enough
that he is remarkable for just those intellectual qualities which the
conventional demagogue never has. Tory newspapers and the "Saturday
Review" sometimes affect to regard Mr. Bright as a man of defective
education, but it is impossible to pretend to think that Mill is
ignorant of Greek or superficial in his knowledge of history. When such
a man makes himself especially the champion of working-men, the
working-men think of him very much as the Irish peasants of '98 and '48
did of Edward Fitzgerald and Smith O'Brien, the aristocrats of birth and
rank, who stepped down from their high places and gave themselves up to
the cause of the unlettered and the poor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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