Demagogues and silver-tongued orators have been the curse in modern times of this country. They and their audiences, grown drunken on their own wild words, have thrown over all consistency. In Bright you had a Radical politician opposed to the holding of an Empire, yet, as a manufacturer and exporter of cotton goods, having his interests largely bound up with the retention of our dependencies. It seemed honesty at the expense of sanity. But less honest was Bright’s bitter objection to any State interference with the factories. In 1836 he resented any attempt to control the hours of labour, and wrote a counter-blast to Fielden’s “Curse of the Factory System.” To the last, he opposed the reduction of factory hours. In 1861 he attributed the evils attendant upon over-production, in which he himself was engaged, to anything but their real cause; but, on the other hand, it must not be forgotten that, although himself a heavy loser by the Cotton Famine, he nobly championed the cause of the North in its darkest hours. Looking back upon things accomplished since he entered the political scene, his Radicalism seems to have been singularly diluted with Whiggism: inevitable, no doubt, from his position as a large employer of labour. As a Quaker, he was for Disestablishment; being a landowner, he endeavoured to bring about the abolition of the Game Laws; he was, as we have already seen, bitterly opposed, throughout his life, to State regulation of factories. He denounced Chartism, of which most of the points of reform demanded have long since been conceded, and, in reply to the demands of the factory hands for better payment, invented the comprehensive generality that “with bad trade, wages cannot rise”; tracing all evils to the Corn Law, that effectual red-herring drawn across many trails. Always the Corn Law, until its abolition in 1849. It was responsible for almost everything ill, short of earthquakes. Bright opposed compulsory education—for that would probably educate the factory hands into discontent with their station; and was eager to extend the cultivation of cotton in India. When that project did not meet with the support he expected, and when his protest against the Indian protective duties failed to open India to cotton goods free of duty, “Perish India” became more than ever a pious wish. Perhaps one of his greatest mistakes was his contempt for the bogey of Papal aggression; not such a mere illuminated turnip on a post as he and his contemporaries believed. Rome stalks through the land, aggressive, at this day. VI