The Sun.
London, England, 1866-04-24 00:00:00

ot

LONDON, TUESDAY, APRIL 24, 1866.

.-----^.O-.

The in speech of the renewed discussion
upTuuthoep
Reformeug Bill came last evening as an anti-
climax. It being perfectly well known that the
adjournment on Friday night had been moved by

no less illlustrious an orator than Mr. BRIGHT, the

House of Commons was yesterday, if possible,
more densely crowded than upon any one of the five

preceding nights devoted to this memorable discus-

*non. At ten minutes to five o'clock the hon. mem-

ber for Birmingham rose, and it was not until ten

minutes to seven o'clock that he resumed his seat.

So that during exactly two hours he occupied

the attention of his hearers. Yet, fixed though
that attention was upon every word that fell
from his lips—it would be utterly impossible to say
that he carried even a portion of his audience with
him for two minutes together. His speech, as a

speech, was in plain terms a dead- failure. It fell
flatly upon the House from beginning to end. It

never, even for the length of one single sentence, rose
to anything like eloquence. The Great Tribune yf

the People might just as well, perhaps better, so far
as his reputation was concerned, have been stricken
dumb. It is only fair to add, however, that
during the chief part of the sezond hour his
voice nearly entirely failed him. It was as if

his argument stuck in his throat. With a
suppressed emphasis that was at times almost pain-
ful to listen to, he was endeavouring to clear it—

his throat, that is, never once his argument (which
remained stifled and confused to the very close)—
throughout the whole of the concluding passages
of his harangue, passages which can hardly be

dignified with the name of a peroration. Added to
all these glaring deficencies for once apparent in the
very manner of Mr. BRIGHT'S expressing himself,

he was distressingly at fault again and again in
the way of bad taste, in the way of blunder-
ing into more than one gaucherie. For in-
stance, what possibly could be in worse taste
than his remarking?—" I think it is a painful, and
more than that, that it is a perilous thing when

'the heirs of two of the most ancient, wealthy, and
powerful of the houses of the English nobility op-

pose themselves to this moderate and just bill" o 1

the Government ! Those words, if they meant any

thing at all, meant a threat only worthy of Jack
Cade—not the thoughtful reasoning of an intellec-

tual debater in a great legislative assembly ! The
argument in fact thus expressed was uttered in very
truth in the language not of the Senate, but, on the
contrary, as Mr. WHrrEsiDE put it afterwards, in
the language far rather of the Platform. In
reality—is was no argument at all. It was
simply a menace—a brutum fulmen !
Again— bearing in mind the grossly vulgar im-
putation that was cast forth, by the hon. member for
Birmingham, in a certain letter of his published
during the Easter recess— an imputation cast by
him, like a splash of mud directed from the shovel

of a scavenger, against a cluster of gentlemen and
noblemen quite as honourable, quite as much above
the reach of all such scurrilous imputations
as himself—remembering, in point of fact, the
coarseness of the epithet with which Mr. BRIGHT
referred, in that notorious letter of his, to Earl
GROSVENOR and Mr. LOWE, to Lord STANLEY and

Mr. 11ORS11 AN7 and to others, as so many

dirty conspirators—it really and truly amounted
to nothing less than a piece of consummate
effrontery on the part of Mr. BRIGHT his
coolly affecting last night to repel that dis-
graceful epithet, as though it had been
originally directed not (as it was) by himself
against Lord STANLEY, and those associated with
Lord STANLEY, but—by Lord STANLEY against him
the member for Birmingham ! Referring to the
second reading of the so-called Conspiracy Bill,

Mr. BRIGHT thin actually contrived to make
bad worse :—" Before the second reading [of that
Bill, the Conspiracy Bill] came on [said he], my
right hon. friend the President of the Board of Trade
gave notice of a resolution, which on debate, was car-
ried by the house ; the noble lord [meaning Lord
i STANLEY] —certainly his friends—departing alto -
1 gether from their course on the first reading,
j turned completely round on their own policy, sup-
ported my right hon. friend, went into the same
lobby with us, and made a majority against the
Government of Lord PALMERSTON." And he then
went on to say last evening, with what we have but
just designated nothing less, as it appears to us, un-
der the circumstances, than consummate effrontery
—" If there were any conspiracy, it came from the
other side of the house ; and if it was a dirty con.
spiracy, the dirt was imported into it by the noble
lord and his friends." Why—really—to hoar Mr.
BRIGHT talking thus last evening, one might abso-
lutely have been led to suppose that that elegant
epithet of " a dirty conspiracy" had come originally
from the lips of ',Lord STANLEY! Whereas--as
all the world knows—it fell (with dishonour
to himself when using it) from the pen of Mr.
BRIGHT ! And now, as we have seen, it has
even been enhanced by Mr. BRIGHT in the
grossness of its application ! A dirty con-
spiracy not being foul enough as a phrase, Mr.
BRIGHT goes so far as to say that " the dirt was im-
ported into it [that is, into the conspiracy he is re-
ferring to] by the noble lord [Lord STANLEY] and
his friends ! Nice language, that, certainly, for the
British House of Commons ! A House that we are
accustomed to look upon—and from no vain infatua-
tion, we believe —as about as noble an assemblage
of gentlemen as there is in the world. Instead of
having the grace, however—nay, we must go so far
as to say in yet plainer terms than that, the simple
decency—to recall that shameful phrase of a dirty
conspiracy, and to apologise to the House f Com-
mons for ever having in a moment of passion ap-
plied it to any among its members--Mr. BRIGHT, as
we have just now seen, as we had the pain of
hearing only last evening when these
later words of his were spoken in the presence
of the Speaker, and in the hushed silence of the
assembled Commons of England, Mr. BRIGHT flung
once more his own shameful words in the face of
Lord STANLEY and in the faces of Lord STANLEY'S
friends, remarking that that yet earlier conspiracy,
that he. was talking about in regard to the so-
called Conspiracy Bill, was not only a dirty conspi-
racy, but had—(these are Mr. BRIGHT'S own words,
remcmbr, words uttered by him as recently as
Iyesterday)—" had the dirt imported into it by the
noble lord and his friends !" All which we are led

to suppose, of course, is simply an expression of
Mr. BRIGHT'S notion of what is meant by argu-
ment ! No wonder, with such a sense strong upon
him of the responsibilities of a debater—no wonder,
we say, that Under the temporary cloud of such
an hallucination—Mr. BRIGHT, although one of
the most gifted orators that ever adorned the
annals of a Legislature with the glory of his elo-
quence, for once delivered one of the most com-
plete and unmitigated failures in the shape of a
lengthened Parliamentary harangue that we ever