Page:Notes on the Anti-Corn Law Struggle.djvu/25

 said, "that the soldiers behind him were his commission, being a commanded party out of every regiment." The courtiers, in the great struggle for liberty, laughed and jeered at the eloquence of the talking members of the Commons' House of Parliament. The landowners, in the struggle for freedom of trade, did not drive their view of the question between them and the Free-traders so far as the King did his view of the question between him and the Parliament; for as the battles of Marston Moor and Naseby settled the question of the divine right of Kings, the pecuniary resources of Lancashire, rendered more formidable by the Irish Famine, settled the question of the divine right of squires.

The extraordinary power of enchaining the attention of their audience, displayed by Mr. Cobden and Mr. Bright, particularly by Mr. Bright in the latter part of his career—for some twenty years ago he had not nearly the popularity he now has, inasmuch as a weekly publication, intending to damage a book which I published with my name, did not give either my name or that of my book, but described me as "a writer of Mr. Bright's school,"—may give occasion for a few words on the old and much debated question whether