Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, vol 1 | Page 3

In brief, the policy of the Company in
dealing with India was the policy of Old Spain with her Transatlantic
possessions, only that it was more jealous and illiberal.
Against these social and political evils, and many others which might
be enumerated, a very small body of true and resolute statesmen
arrayed themselves. Among these statesmen the most eminent were the
two chiefs of the Anti-Corn-law agitation. Never did men lead a hope
which seemed more forlorn. They had as opponents nearly the whole
Upper House of Parliament, a powerful and compact party in the Lower.
The Established Church was, of course, against them. The London
newspapers, at that time almost the only political power in the press,
were against them. The 'educated' classes were against them. Many of
the working people were unfriendly to them, for the Chartists believed
that the repeal of the Corn-laws would lower the price of labour. After
a long struggle they gained the day; for an accident, the Irish famine,
rendered a change in the Corn-laws inevitable. But had it not been for
the organization of the League, the accident would have had no effect;
for it is a rule in the philosophy of politics that an accident is valuable
only when the machinery for making use of the accident is at hand.
Calamities never teach wisdom to fools, they render it possible that the
wise should avail themselves of the emergency.
A similar calamity, long foreseen by prudent men, caused the political
extinction of the East India Company. The joint action of the Board of
Control and the Directors led to the Indian mutiny. The suppression of
the Indian mutiny led to the suppression of the Leadenhall Street Divan.
Another calamity, also foreseen by statesmen, the outbreak of the

American Civil War, gave India commercial hope, and retrieved the
finances which the Company's rule had thrown into hopeless disorder.
I have selected the speeches contained in these two volumes, with a
view to supplying the public with the evidence on which Mr. Bright's
friends assert his right to a place in the front rank of English statesmen.
I suppose that there is no better evidence of statesmanship than
prescience; that no fuller confirmation of this evidence can be found
than in the popular acceptance of those principles which were once
unpopular and discredited. A short time since, Lord Derby said that Mr.
Bright was the real leader of the Opposition. It is true that he has given
great aid to that opposition which Lord Derby and his friends have
often encountered, and by which, to their great discredit, but to their
great advantage, they have been constantly defeated. If Lord Derby is
in the right, Mr. Bright is the leader of the People, while his Lordship
represents a party which is reckless because it is desperate. The policy
which Mr. Bright has advocated in these pages, and throughout a
quarter of a century, a policy from which he has never swerved, has at
last been accepted by the nation, despite the constant resistance of Lord
Derby and his friends. It embodies the national will, because it has
attacked, and in many cases vanquished, institutions and laws which
have become unpopular, because they have been manifestly
mischievous and destructive. No one knows better how conservative
and tolerant is public opinion in England towards traditional
institutions, than Mr. Bright does; or how indifferent the nation is to
attacks on an untenable practice and a bad law, until it awakens to the
fact that the law or the practice is ruinous.
Mr. Bright's political opinions have not been adopted because they
were popular. He was skilfully, and for a time successfully, maligned
by Lord Palmerston, on account of his persevering resistance to the
policy of the Russian War. But it is probable that the views he
entertained at that time will find more enduring acceptance than those
which Lord Palmerston and Lord Palmerston's colleagues promulgated,
and that he has done more to deface that Moloch, 'the balance of
power,' than any other man living. Shortly after the beginning of the
Planters' War, almost all the upper, and many of the middle classes,

sympathized with the Slave- owners' conspiracy. Everybody knows
which side Mr. Bright took, and how judicious and far-sighted he was
in taking it. But everybody should remember also how, when Mr.
Bright pointed out the consequences likely to ensue from the cruise of
the Alabama, he was insulted by Mr. Laird in the House of Commons;
the Mr. Laird who launched the Alabama, who has been the means of
creating bitter enmity between the people of this country and of the
United States, and has contrived to invest the unlawful speculation of a
shipbuilder with the dignity of an international difficulty, to make it the
material