Western Worthies | Page 5

that the Member for Renfrewshire, who
might be supposed from his patronymic to be a Scotchman, is not even
connected closely by family ties with this part of the Island. His
position, however, as the member for Renfrewshire, and his consequent
intimate connection with the West of Scotland, may excuse his
appearance in these pages.
In 1837, when he was only 22 years of age, Mr. Bruce was called to the
bar. He practised at the Chancery bar, and attended the Oxford Circuit

for two years. He withdrew from practice in 1843, but still retained his
name on the rolls of Lincoln's Inn. In 1847, four years after this
withdrawal, he received the appointment of Stipendiary Magistrate at
Merthyr-Tydvil and Aberdare, the office previously held by his father,
and for a period of more than five years he presided at the Police
Courts of those towns. From this office he retired in the December of
1852, when he was elected Member for the Merthyr boroughs, the seat
having become vacant by the death of that Sir John Guest whom his
father had unsuccessfully opposed many years previously. Mr. Bruce
has all along manifested a deep interest in the affairs of his own
neighbourhood. He was Deputy-Chairman of Quarter Sessions in his
native county of Glamorganshire, and he was also Chairman of the
Vale of Neath Railway, Captain of the Glamorganshire Rifle
Volunteers, and fourth Charity Commissioner of England and Wales.
Mr. Bruce retained his seat for Merthyr without interruption for a
period of seventeen years. He had been ten years in the House of
Commons when, in the November of 1862, he was nominated to office
by Lord Palmerston; and it is worthy of remark that he was then
appointed Under-Secretary of the very department over which he now
presides--the post which was conferred the other day by Mr. Gladstone
on the young and promising Member for Stroud. Mr. Winterbotham has
not had to serve as long a political and administrative apprenticeship as
his chief; for at the early age of twenty-seven, and after a Parliamentary
career of only two years, he has leapt into the office which Mr. Bruce
did not procure till he was twenty years older and a Member of ten
years' standing. This significant fact seems to "point a moral." It shows
that there is now-a-days a better chance for the man who is capable for
an important political post, despite his circumstances and antecedents.
Mr. Winterbotham is as staunch a Liberal and as pronounced a
Nonconformist as any of his ancestors; and yet, as we have seen, he is
appointed at twenty-seven by Mr. Gladstone to an office which Lord
Palmerston did not bestow upon Mr. Bruce until the latter was verging
on fifty; and it is not at all improbable that Lord Palmerston, when he
made the appointment in 1862, took credit to himself for stretching a
point in favour of a laborious and deserving man?

Mr. Bruce had been Under-Secretary at the Home Office for about a
year-and-a-half when he was appointed Vice-President of the
Committee of Council on Education. This office he held for more than
two years. His tenure of it came to a close in 1866, when Lord Derby
(or rather Derby-cum-Disraeli) returned to power. It was during these
two years, in which he devoted himself to the subject of education, that
he made the most impressive appearance which any portion of his
career has yet presented either to the House of Commons or to the
country. Though a nominee of Lord Palmerston, and like his patron
anything but an advanced Liberal, he displayed an apparent breadth of
view and an earnestness of purpose in his new sphere of Ministerial
labour which were exceedingly creditable to him. Some of his speeches
on education were admirable, and their tone may be guessed from the
fact that they made him a favourite at the time with such organs of
public opinion as Mr. Miall's Nonconformist.
It has been argued that Mr. Bruce had not the elevated motives which
must inspire a thoroughly successful minister of education; that he was
still the police magistrate in his ideas; and that he wished to call in the
schoolmaster to aid in the repression of crime. But it is only fair to add
that he never said a word to show that he did not value education for
itself, and in his own locality he has been a constant patron of
Mechanics' and other educational institutions. Again, it has been said
that his rejection by the house-holders of Merthyr at the general
election, indicated that he had not really succeeded in winning the
confidence of the working classes. But there are other circumstances to
account for this that ought not to be lost sight of. The constituency was