Page:History of the Radical Party in Parliament.djvu/426

 412 History of the Radical Party in Parliament. [1855- its service one of the most devoted, most indefatigable, and most honourable men who have, in modern times, represented the cause of liberty and progress in Parliament. Joseph Hume died on the 2Oth of February, at the age of seventy- eight. It would be much easier to forget many of the services which he rendered to the nation than to overrate the work which he actually accomplished. He was amongst the earliest and ablest advocates of free trade ; always an earnest friend of national education ; and the acknowledged champion of the cause of Parliamentary reform. Wherever liberty was restricted, either by test acts which touched the conscience or by combination laws which affected the industrial rights of the people, Hume stood forward to remove the obstruction. He was one of the first of the statesmen who advocated large and liberal principles in the government of the colonies, and was throughout his life a strenuous supporter of a policy of justice and conciliation towards Ireland. He carried, almost single-handed, the repeal of the old combination laws, of the prohibition of the export of machinery, and of the Act for pre- venting workmen from going abroad. In a like manner, almost alone, he exposed and defeated that monstrous Orange con- spiracy, which, although it is now nearly forgotten, was at the time a dangerous attempt headed by the second heir to the throne and the commander of the national army to effect by force a change in the government of the country, to repeal the great popular reform accomplished in 1832, and to restore to the aristocracy the power of which that great Act had deprived them. In later times, his especial devotion to the principles, and his insistence upon the details, of financial reform had overshadowed the memory of his more general services ; but, as a public writer * said on the occasion of his death, " It would be wrong to suppose that Mr. Hume's mind was contracted to the effecting mere pecuniary savings, although the mountain of abuses he had to destroy rendered necessary an incessant application to the task. He was a reformer of a higher order, quite capable of appreciating the
 * Morning Chronicle quoted in "Annual Register," 1855, p. 254.