and unprincipled clique like the Athenian, ready to use any weapon from
murder down or to make their country a province of a foreign empire
rather than give up their class monopoly of power; but like his
prototype he was a democrat by nature as well as profession, the welfare
of the common people at once his passion and his political livelihood,
full of faith that popular instincts are both morally right and
intellectually sound, and all his own instincts and most of his labors
antagonistic to those of the aristocracy. It is a phase of the same fact
to say that he also represented the active force of religious feeling in
politics, as opposed to pure secular statesmanship.

[Illustration: JOHN BRIGHT]

The son of a Quaker manufacturer of Rochdale, England, and born near
that place November 16th, 1811, he began his public career when a mere
boy as a stirring and effective temperance orator, his ready eloquence
and intense earnestness prevailing over an ungraceful manner and a bad
delivery; he wrought all his life for popular education and for the
widest extension of the franchise; and being a Quaker and a member of
the Peace Society, he opposed all war on principle, fighting the Crimean
War bitterly, and leaving the Gladstone Cabinet in 1882 on account of
the bombardment of Alexandria. He was retired from the service of the
public for some time on account of his opposition to the Crimean War;
but Mr. Gladstone, who differed from him on this point, calls it the
action of his life most worthy of honor. He was perhaps the most warlike
opponent of war ever high in public life; the pugnacious and aggressive
agitator, pouring out floods of fiery oratory to the effect that nobody
ought to fight anybody, was a curious paradox.

He was by far the most influential English friend of the North in the