after him, became members of the House of Commons, and they were further
assisted there by Milner Gibson, a man of position and family, an
effective debater, who had been at first a Conservative, but who passed
over to the ranks of the Free Traders, and through them to the ranks of
the Liberals or Radicals.

Every year Villiers brought on a motion in the House in favor of free
trade. For a long time this motion was only one of the annual
performances which, by an apparently inevitable necessity, have to
prelude for many years the practical movement of any great parliamentary
question. Villiers might have brought on his annual motion all his life,
without getting much nearer to his object, if Manchester, Birmingham,
Sheffield, Leeds, and other great northern towns had not taken the
matter vigorously in hand; if Cobden and Bright had not stirred up the
energies of the whole country, and brought clearly home to the mind of
every man the plain fact that reason, argument, and arithmetic, as well
as freedom and justice, were distinctly on their side.

The Anti-Corn-Law League showered pamphlets, tracts, letters,
newspapers, all over the country. They sent lecturers into every town,
preaching the same doctrine, and proving by scientific facts the justice
of the cause they advocated. These lecturers were enjoined to avoid as
much as possible any appeals to sentiment or to passion. The cause they
had in hand was one which could best be served by the clear statement of
rigorous facts, by the simple explanation of economical truths which no
sophism could darken, and which no opposing eloquence could charm away.
The Melbourne Ministry fell in 1841. It died of inanition: its force was
spent. Sir Robert Peel came into office. Cobden, who then entered the
House of Commons for the first time, seemed to have good hope that even
Peel, strong Conservative though he was, might prove to be a man from