Page:Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892).djvu/683

Rh desired to see and hear and was much gratified by being able to see and hear. There were Sir Robert Peel, Daniel O'Connell, Richard Cobden, John Bright, Lord John Russell, Sir James Graham, Benjamin Disraeli, Lord Morpeth, and others, but except Mr. Gladstone, not one who was there then is there now. Mr. Bright was alive, but ill health kept him out of Parliament. Five and forty years before, I saw him there, young, robust and strong; a rising British statesman representing a new element of power in his country, and battling as the co-worker of Richard Cobden, against the corn-laws which kept bread from the mouths of the hungry. His voice and eloquence were then a power in Parliament. At that time the question which most deeply interested and agitated England was the repeal of the corn-laws. Of this agitation Mr. Richard Cobden and Mr. Bright, backed by the anti-corn-law league, were the leaders. The landed aristocracy of England, represented by the Tory party, opposed the repeal with intense zeal and bitterness. But the circumstances were against that interest and against that party. The famine of 1845 was doing its ghastly work, and the people not only of Ireland, but of England and Scotland, were asking for bread, more bread, and cheaper bread; and this was a petition to which resistance was vain. The facts and figures of Cobden and the eloquence of Mr. Bright, supported by the needs of the people, bore down the powerful opposition of the aristocracy, and finally won over to repeal the great Tory leader in the person of Sir Robert Peel, one of the most graceful debaters and ablest parliamentarians that England ever had. A more fascinating man than he I never saw or heard in any legislative body. But able and skillful leader as he was, he could not carry his party with him. The landed proprietors opposed him to the last. Their cause was