Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/38

 His memorable defeat at Manchester was, for him, the greatest moral victory of his life, and he has had many. With a sublime courage, which has never been surpassed, he strove almost single-handed to arrest in its mad career a whole nation in pursuit of a mischievous phantom. In the American war his services to his own country and to America were unrivalled, and happily more successful.

That he is one of the best and most intelligent friends of India, of Ireland, and of the unenfranchised and unprivileged masses of Englishmen and Scotsmen will go without saying. As a member of Mr. Gladstone's cabinet he was introduced at court, and is said to be a favorite there. I should have liked him better had he continued—to use his own words—"to abide among his own people." Evil communications have a tendency to corrupt the best manners, and Mr. Bright has never been at his best since he made the acquaintance of royalty.

Latterly the brunt of the fighting has fallen on Gladstone, who, by an arduous heart-searching process, has, at seventy, reached conceptions of the public good which were familiar to Mr. Bright's mind at twenty. It is Mr. Bright's turn to put his powerful hand to the plough. He looks vigorous as ever, and it has not been his wont to spare himself in great emergencies. Let him remember the wisdom of Ulysses addressed to the "great and godlike" Achilles,—