Page:Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892).djvu/302

294 it right? is it just? is it humane?" Wherever these two great men appeared, the people assembled in thousands. They could, at an hour's notice, pack the Town Hall of Birmingham, which would hold seven thousand persons, or the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, and Covent Garden theater, London, each of which was capable of holding eight thousand.

One of the first attentions shown me by these gentlemen was to make me welcome at the Free-Trade Club, in London.

I was not long in England before a crisis was reached in the anti-corn-law movement. The announcement that Sir Robert Peel, then prime minister of England, had become a convert to the views of Messrs. Cobden and Bright, came upon the country with startling effect, and formed the turning-point in the anti-corn-law question. Sir Robert had been the strong defense of the landed aristocracy of England, and his defection left them without a competent leader; and just here came the opportunity so Mr. Benjamin Disraeli, the Hebrew, since Lord Beaconsfield. To him it was in public affairs the "tide which led on to fortune." With a bitterness unsurpassed he had been denounced, by reason of his being a Jew, as a lineal descendant of the thief on the cross. But now his time had come, and he was not the man to permit it to pass unimproved. For the first time, it seems, he conceived the idea of placing himself at the head of a great party, and thus become the chief defender of the landed aristocracy. The way was plain. He was to transcend all others in effective denunciation of Sir Robert Peel, and surpass all others in zeal. His ability was equal to the situation, and the world knows the result of his ambition. I watched him narrowly when I saw him in the House of Commons, but I saw and heard nothing there that foreshadowed the immense space he at last came to