The Sun.
London, England, 1860-04-13 00:00:00

how Mr. BRIGHT, starting to his feet in the House
of Commons itself, could not resist the inclination
about a month since to cry out like DENNISthe

Critic, speaking from the pit of the playhouse—
" That's my thunder !" Meaning that Commercial

Treaty with France, which was to bind the
__.

western allies together in a never ending alliance,
and which was nevertheleEs hardly arranged, even

in the preliminaries, before there were evidences only
too apparent of a sudden and sinister estrangement.
Whatever credit, however, there might be claimed
for the Treaty in the first flush of its announce-
ment—and a good deal was claimed for it (don't we
all recollect that vividly enough ? ) by the intro-
I ducers of it to the notice of the Legislature—it was
credit due (Mr. BRIGHT took good care to inform
the country from his place in the House of Com-
mons) not to Mr. GLADSTONE as England's Chan-
cellor of the Exchequer, not to Mr. COBDEN, Eng-
land's undiplomatic Plenipotentiary, not to the

Emperor NAPOLEON, as the supreme Autocrat of
France, but to the sage and still more supreme
adviser, mentor, and good genius of them all, Mr.
JOHN BRIGHT, M.P. for Birmingham. In proof of
this, Mr. BRIGHT even went the unusual and
almost the un-Parliamentary length of quoting
his own sagacious and prophetic speeches for the
delight of the admiring and obsequious House of
Commons: All this is now, as the phrase is,
matter of history ; in other words, those who care
to enter at any future time upon the dusty and
doleful process of disinterment may find the re-
marks we are alluding to carefully entombed in
what the author of " St. Stephen's" has happily
called those " sepulchres of speeches," the fast
multiplying volumes of HANSARD'S Parliamentary
Debates.

Remembering what Mr. BRIGHT had the
effrontery to say in the House of Commons
during the previous part of this present session,
it was hardly a matter of surprise to find him
vaunting to the very skies down at Manchester that
Commercial Treaty with France which he has
already claimed as the distinct emanation from his
own brain—somewhat after the fashion of PALLAS
starting in full panoply out of the headache of
JOVE. Among many other flagrant outrages upon
our common sense—indulged in last evening by
Mr. BRIGHT in the course of this full hour and
twenty minutes of indirect self-glorification
—one or two at the very least may
be here specified as really and truly nothing short
of being absolutely outrageous. For example—
Speaking of the duties remitted through the double
medium of Budget and Treaty, Mr. BRIGHT ob-
served that it was objected that those duties were
chiefly taken off luxuries. And Mr. BRIGHT
thereupon added, " The truth was, we had not
many articles left, except luxuries, the duties on
which could be abolished ! " Not a syllable about
the duties still rigidly maintained on tea and
sugar—at the very time that the duties are wan-
tonly taken unasked from silk and from claret !
Another outrage upon our common sense was that
before indulged in by Mr. BRIGHT, and which he
reiterated vociferously last night when speaking of
Mr. COBDEN as England's unpaid and unrewarded
benefactor. This has, though the medium of Mr.
BRIGHT especially, come of late to be quite a
parrot-cry among the glorifiers of the Manchester
school of politicians. It has grown at last
an assertion no longer, to ourselves at least,
in any way tolerable. We distinctly and absolutely
deny its accuracy. We maintain that Mr. COBDEN,
for whatever good service he has done to his coun-
try as a Freetrader, as the foremost and the greatest
of all Freetraders,has not gone " unpaid" and "unre-
warded," has not gone even without " decorations."
Several years ago, in distinct recognition of his
good services to the country, as a Freetrader, as
the. Freetrader, Mr. RICHARD COBDEN received a
round sum of £BO,OOO sterling. If that amount has
since then melted away, it is Mr. COBDEN'S misfor-
tune—it is no fault in any way of the nation. Be-
' sides receiving those £BO,OOO sterling, Mr. COBDEN
has twice been elected during his absence from
England to a seat in the House of Commons by
two important and independent constituencies.
Added to which, at the moment of the triumph of
the cause which he had so long and nobly advo-
cated, Mr. COBDEN received a panegyric from the
lips of the Prime Minister of England, a man whom
Mr. DisnAELI (his severest critic) has finely
designated "the greatest member of Parliament
that ever lived"—Mr. COBDEN received from Sir
ROBERT PEEL a magnanimous eulogium ghat was
certainly, to our thinking, at least, equivalent to
any bit of ribbon or tinsel star with which the
Great Freetrader's breast could have been deco-
rated. Enough, however, for this once—we are
really tired to death of these flagrant evidences of
an utter want of all taste, and these wanton out-
rages upon the common sense of the great mass of
the people with which Mr. BRIGHT is latterly in
Ithe habit of " pointing the moral and adorning
the tale" of his egregious self glorification.

It seems rather late in the day to defend a pure
monopoly. Yet this commercially chivalrous task
has been undertaken by a contemporary, and by
one, too, who has not failed, since the wind set in
strongly towards free trade, to ridicule and banter
all who wanted to retain protection for their own
trade. We were certainly rather surprised, there-
fore, to see the journal we refer to exerting all its
influence in favour of the Bible Printing Monopoly,
and we scanned with not a little curiosity the ar-
guments which could be adduced in favour of giv-
ing to one, or two, or three parties, the exclusive
right of printing a book which every family
almost in the nation should have, and which
every educated person is sure to possess.
In a Protestant country,
almost as universal a want as fabricsttiehecottßonibleis
l
of Manchester. No one would term the Bible a
luxury. Every religious Protestant deems it to be
a religious necessity. He takes his motto from
CIIILLINGWORTH, that " the Bible and the Bible
only is the religion of Protestants."
Now we all know that in the age of monopolies,
the printing of the Bible was made one also. It
somehow survived many others ; perhaps, because
it was absurdly supposed that monopoly was a
security for accuracy; though the patent makes no
stipulations for that purpose. Perhaps because the
Head of the Church was assumed to have a right to
print Bibles and Prayer-books for his Church,
though it is hard to see how he could claim the
right to print Bibles for Dissenters also. Be
this as it may the monopoly did survive even
to our times. In Scotland it gave way
before the attacks of Mr. HUME, and
but for the reduction of price, brought about by
the efforts of the Scotchmen, and by arousing public
attention to the enormous cost of the Scriptures,
compared with what that cost ought to be, the
English monopoly would have been brought to the
test of law, and probably overthrown. It is held
by good legal authorities that the Sovereign has no
right to grant such a patent. That he ought not
to have the right, is quite certain.
The chief argument of our contemporary seems
to be that the Chairman's casting vote decided
the report. An argument amounting to this
—that the committee was half composed
'of monopolists, half of free-traders ; while the