The Sun.
London, England, 1868-11-04 00:00:00

MR. BRIGHT AT EDINBURGH.

Mr. Bright's speech at Edinburgh contained worm
noteworthy passages. It was a general review of the
various subjects which command attention just now. He
commenced by modestly disclaiming to be what the
address sailed him, " a distinguished orator and states-

man." Or rather, he said, that it " made him blush" to hear
these expressions applied to him. " Now, more than thirty

years ago, when I was very young indeed, and justbeginning
to think about public affairs, in reading the prose writings
of John Milton, I found a passage which fixed itself in my
mind, and which time has never been able to remove.
He says, ' Yet true eloquence I find to be none but the

serious and hearty love of truth.' And I have endeavoured,
so far as I have had the opportunity of speaking in public,

;0 abide by that opinion. So far as lam able to examine

myself during the thirty years that I have been permitted
to speak at meetings of my countrymen, I am not con-
scious that I have ever used an argument which I did not
believe to be sound, cr stated anything as a fact which
I did not believe to be true. I have endeavoured, further,
always to abstain from speaking on subjects which I had
not examined and well considered; and perhaps it is because
I have endeavoured to attend to these rules that what I
have said has met with some acceptance, and perhaps in
some quarters has been influential to the country. As to the
title of statesman, I may say here what I said many years
ago in the House of Commons, that I have seen so much
intrigue and ambition and selfishness and inconsistencies
in the character of many statesmen, so called, that I
have always been rather anxious to disclaim the
title. I have been content to offer myself as a simple
citizen, honestly examining public questions affecting the
public weal, and honestly offering my counsels to my
countryman." Mr. Bright, in passing to the question of
the day, first referred to free trade. He eulogised Mr.
Cobden, and expressed his surprise that it should have
taken so long to convince the world that free trade was
right. 'There was a sentence which he recollected
in a letter, he thought, that was written by the
celebrated Mrs. Somerville, which ought of itself

----- --
to have abolished the corn laws, but did not. She
- -

said " Surely as much food as a man can buy, with as
much wages as a man can get for as much work as a man
can do, is not more than the natural, inalienable birth-
right of every man whom God has created with strength
to labour and with hands to work." He did not claim great
credit for being on the right side with regard to those views or
to other matters. "I am one of those who have everbelieved
that there is nothing very mysterious in the art or knowledge
of politics ; that with regard to what we' call statesman-
ship, it is not an abstruse and 8 difficult branch of know-
ledge ; and if, when we come to consider a public ques-
tion, we were able to strip it of all the things which do not
really belong to it, and to get at the pith and kernel of the
matter, I think that our intellects are so much on a par,
and that, as a whole, we are so anxious to act honestly
and rightly, that on nearly all occasions we should be
able to come to an early and a wise agreement as to the
course which the public should pursue. Now, in the course
of my political life there have been several great questions
which have interested me, and on each of which I have
been astonished that I found myself at variance with so
many of my countrymen, and I have notbeen less delighted
afterwards to find that, by and by, we all seemed to agree ;
but, unfortunately, the agreement came to a certain
extent too late, and the misfortunes which had been, per-
haps, foretold, or which were inevitable, happened, and it
was only after the fact that we were able to agree as to
what ought to have been done." India, Mr. Bright went
on to say, was one of those questions. Fifteen years ago
the Government of India was the most extraordinary
Government in the world. It was called a double Govern-
ment ; it consisted of a number of directors of an extinct
trading compauy—a company that was always bank-
rupt. The directors, who were bred in corrup-
tion, and who in point of fact might be said to have
lived upon it, neglected everything they ought to have
done, except the collecting and expending.of taxes; and to
that curious Government was added a Minister of
State, who was appointed to control the said directors.
He allowed them to do everything evil that they liked to
do, and he added to their evils some other greater evil of
his own. On a system like this there were numbers of
persons in this country who asserted that it was possible
to go on governing the country so ; he had heard a Cabinet
Minister of repute speak for five hours, not only in defence
of that system, but in a glowing eulogium upon
it. .Within five years of that speech there came
a change, and, it might be said the flood came,
namely, the mutiny, and swept the whole thing away.
It is a great question still. Although it swept much away,
it did not establish everything that was necessary. The
future of that great country was still neglected by states-
men, and its future was almost wholly unprovided for.

But Mr. Bright did not go into what should he done in
the future. He passed to the Eastern question. We went
to war, he said, for Turkey; but Turkey had become weaker,
and Russia, by the manumission of her serfs, stronger.
Then as to the American struggle, Mr. Bright reiterated
his well-known opinions upon it, deplored the side our
Government, by sympathy, had taken, thought that this
was brought about by jealousy, and hoped that the result
of the elections now proceeding would be to give continued
power to the patty which had always been in favour of
freedom and the union. As to Parliamentary Reform,
too, he ran over the old arguments, and wondered that people
should have taken so long to be convinced by them. Then
as to Ireland and the Church, he rebutted the argument
as to the Churches of England and Ireland being in the
same danger. " I am sorry," he said, "to see some of
our friends in England are insisting upon it that if you do
a certain thing in Ireland you must therefore do it in
England—that the English act will follow inevitably
from the Irish act. Now I venture to predict, that
within ten years, when anybody looks to what has been
done in Ireland, to take arguments as to what should
be done in Scotland or England, you will find our
friends using this argument—they will turn round
and say, 'No.' Turning round, in the language
of the lawyers, they will say, The Irish Church
is not a leading case. In point of fact there are
special facts connected with Ireland, and you have
no right whatever to argue that because it was right in
Ireland it will be so in England.' " Mr. Bright also referred
to the land question. " That is a matter of great
difficulty, and which no doubt before long the people
of the two kingdoms will be asked carefully to consider.
If the land of Scotland were in the hands, almost
all of it, of proprietors of the Roman Catholic religion,
if they were absentees and in a sense foreigners, if they
gave to none of your tenants leases, if they never
expended money in any permanent improvement on a
farm, I would like to ask you what would be the kind
of content which would prevail amongst the agricultural
population of Scotland. It would be that kind of
content that we call discontent, and, indeed, you would
have a state of things in Scotland which would prove an
incessant agitation until the Imperial Parliament had
found some mode of remedying the grievance complained
of." He was surprised also that it took so long to free the
press. The press had been a great engine for education.
As to the question purely of education," we have got, some
of us—l have not, but I have found a great many people
who have—a very stupid idea that it would be wrong to
teach and give a child reading and writing and the
ordinary Machinery for knowledge unless you can at
the same time give him the religious opinions which we
ourselves hold, and not only the religious opinions, but
very often all the unessential details which Churches all
over the world have built up into their different
systems. Nov it will soon be put to the people of the
United Kingdom whether. this question can be solved by
us as it has been solved elsewhere. It has been solved
throughout the States of America, in Canada, in British
North American possessions, in Australian colonies, and
in many of the States of Europe. Considering .our
position . and how much we have been in advance of
other countries in other respects, I believe it to be a most
discreditable fact that we have had less attention paid to
the education of the great bulk of the people of this nation
within the last hundred years than in almost any other
Christian or civilised nation in the world. I say it is a very
great discredit to the governing classes of this country, and
it is a very strong argument, which I felt myself at liberty
always to make use of when I was asking that the governing
power should no longer remain in a class, but that it should
be transferred by Parliamentary Reform to the great bulk
of the nation." This, then, was Mr. Bright's review_
of politics. What did it amount to ? Said the hon.
gentleman in answer, "that there is no great mystery in
these political questions; that if you will get rid of what,
if we examine them, we know to be prejudices;
if you will get rid of attendant circumstances
which really have nothing to do with the real
question at issue, you will find that the real question
is a very simple one ; and if you put it against a standard
of common sense and common morality, the people
will not find it difficult to be one of accord, and do all
that can be done, by legislation and administration, to
improve their natural position." " This century," said Mr.
Bright in conclusion, "is a century of changes, changes
that will be held as a lasting memorial of the age in which
we live. lam thankful beyond what I can express, in
reviewing my political life, that I have been permitted to
bear some part in changes the results of which will go
on, I trust, beneficially for ever."

The man worried by the bear which escaped from
the Bello Vue Zoological Gardens, Manchester, has sinco

died.

The death is announced of the Hon. and Rev. A.
Sugdon, second surviving son of Lord St. Leonards.
wqs born in 1822, and was educated at Trinity, College,
Dublin. In 1852 he was presented by his father, who was
Cher. Lord Chancellor, to the rectory of Newdegate, near
llor§hara, which he held up to the time of his death.