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