the legislature of this country; and wherever I stand, whether here or out-of-doors, I will denounce that system of legislative murder." Out-of-doors Mr. Cobden had the strong support of the most eloquent Englishman of his generation, John Bright. The two men had been drawn together early by a common interest in the welfare of the manufacturing classes, and especially in popular education. In September, 1841, Cobden visited his friend in his house, and found him plunged in sadness by the death of his young wife. After words of condolence, he said, with great earnestness, "John, there are thousands of houses in England at this moment where wives, mothers, and children are dying of hunger. Now when the first paroxysm of your grief is passed, I would advise you to come with me and we will never rest until the Corn Law is repealed." "For seven years," Mr. Bright afterward said, "the discussion on that one question--whether it was good for a man to have half a loaf or a whole loaf--for seven years the discussion was maintained, I will not say with doubtful result, for the result was never doubtful and never could be in such a cause; but for five years or more (1841-46), we devoted ourselves without stint; every working hour almost was given up to the discussion and to the movement in connection with this question." Mr. Morley's description of the two orators and their mission is memorable: "The public imagination was struck by the figures of the pair who had given themselves up to a great public cause. The picture of two plain men leaving their homes and their business and going over the length and breadth of the land to convert the nation, had about it something apostolic; it presented something so far removed from the stereotyped ways of political activity, that this circumstance alone, apart from the object for which they were pleading, touched and affected people, and gave a certain dramatic interest to the long pilgrimages of the two men who had only become orators because they had something to say which they were intent on bringing their hearers to believe, and which happened to be true, wise, and just.....In Cobden, as in Bright, we feel that there was nothing personal or small, and that what they cared for so vehemently were great causes. .... Mr. Bright had all the resources of passion alive within his breast. He was carried along by vehement political anger, and deeper than that there glowed a wrath as stern as that of an ancient prophet. To cling to a mischievous error seemed to him to savor of moral depravity and corruption of heart. What he saw was the selfishness of the aristocracy and the landlords and he was too deeply moved by the hatred of this to care to deal very patiently with the bad reasoning which their own self-interest inclined his adversaries to mistake for good. His invective was not the expression of mere irritation, but a profound and menacing passion. Hence he dominated his audiences from a height,