The Express.
London, England, 1855-02-12 00:00:00

MR. BRIGHT'S LAST SPEECH.

(Pros the Weekly Dispatch.)
The Manchester Chamber of Commerce cannot
I assemble for its annual business without Mr. Bright's seis-
ing upon the opportunity to depress the national spirit, and
help the Cur to impose his conditions of disgrace sad depo-
sition upon the nation. If Mr. Bright, as a mere matter of
trade concern, only expreued his notions to a trade audi-
ence, the mischief would be null ; but in the absence of
occasions for reporting the real sentiments of the people,
for sounding the clarion-note of its courage, for pouring out
the depth and strength of its 'isolation, this candle-end
end cheese-paring philosophy usurps the place of the com-
monwealth's will and its noble policy in our journals. The
speaker hopes and intends that it should do so.
Mr. Bright enters into calculations of our losses by the
war—in the price of food, in the withdrawal of capital
from industry, He makes the loss amount to 60 millions

annually. With his usual love of sophistry, he mires the
concerns :of oar ordinary taxation with the main question,
and shows, to his own morbid satisfaction, that such tan-
tioa doubles the productive profit of the cotton trade. That
must pass for what it is worth. It is a peace, not a war
consideration. Who upsets that we are not suffering by
wart We are not ewers, though he assumes to be, of any
"public writers" that have attempted to show "insanely
or dishonestly" that "trade is not suffering at all " by our
war polity. Such an assertion would be as false as his
own, that "all the sources of our prosperity are dried up
by the impoverishment of our people." While we send
many goer beet and bravest, the man of heroic mind as
well as mould, to die and to endure far more than death for
a great and holy, because a necessary cause, we are not base
enough to expect that we at home are to some out of the
struggle in fat and wealth, in jollity and good luck. This
is not our way of trading with human life. It might
content the Quaker friends of peace, whose Mora-
vian brethren the Czar is hanging by the 300 for not
fighting, that an army lost is the Crimea should keep
all loss upon cotton from Manchester; but England claims,
as far as the ossamenwoalth's organisation will admit, to
suffer with the Omens of her resistance to despotism.
The entire nation Is enduring war end will endure it, to
ward off Intolerable enslavement. Mr. Bright may prove
that, had we been at peace with Russia, we should have had
cheaper bread. No doubt of it; and in a quarter of a,
century our children's bread and all else would have been
at the mercy of Russia. We are not arguing on matters of
enlightened patriotism, of brave devotion for the make ell
our native land and of posterity, with Mr. Bright. We
should se soon think of reasoning on the merits of a
sonata of Beethoven's with an oyster. He would reply like
the cherub invited by Noah to take a east, who observed
that he had nothing to sit down with. But it is our duty to
protest, in the country and to all who note its acts, that Great
Britain Is not grudging the expense of the war or calculating it
with Manchester cotton-heartednees, or cotton-headednees.
We should no doubt have suffered dreadfully had the harvest
1864 been as shon as that of 1853. Dia tallier vision. God's
providence does something in the world. Its calculatioos
go beyond those of the cotton market. And 'Then Mr.
Bright cheers the court of St. Petersburg with the assertion
that, if the Russian "8,000,000 quarters of corn are to be,
by the effects of our foreign policy, kept out of this country,
before two years are over you will shoot your own fellow-
citizens in your own streets," he impiously puts out of
sight not only the constantly and wonderfully increasing
=on of this country, but the rational hope of fuller
in America, which has itself been visited this
Saar
im egrith unusual scarcity, and the excellent thanes of
the Turkish and Austrian and Wsllacbian corn
piths as the Danube from all that impedes the trans-
WEISS et their food to us. At the very worst, " what
Meet be eschewed must be embraced," and the last
dlimutive we shall accept is that of truckling to Muscovite
View. It would be rendering Mr. Bright of too much
tgrieto call his attempts treasonable. They are only
nfly-ish. The magazine of a few rusty pike-heads
and tin potllds may well represent hie Intellectual accuracy.
His appeals are only to the basest fears, and the most sordid
instincts. The very chartism that might have echoed him
has risen above his scope of argument. The lowest instincts
of the mob are nobler, truer, and wiser than his Mephisto.
Oils= suggestions. But let us show all possible doubters
that this is a. Let the noble character which ear allies
attribute to us be asserted. Let us net defraud ourselves
of the luxury sad the glory of our eseelliess when we must
encounter their eget. Let us, at leath_npel en Imputations
of cowardice. Let us mesa and, sane we 'mkt upon go-
sentimental vicr and bassi% Mien as gel•rnillifte by
ea
sestheass we are deloolosi M smith both. And
so Ist roma t Wow tale le Mbielso lbw the reports of
his Illiasiabstaar Mungebthe4 with his Crimean m-
eaty" by MMus mess art desk W essevsn-
aims el pewee Ws Nth, wee.