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Parliamentary life has a fascination which few men, having once breathed its intoxicating atmosphere, can successfully withstand. Its call is irresistible. Cobden thus wrote from a retreat in Wales, in July, 1846, after the object of his parliamentary career, the repeal of the Corn Laws, had been achieved:
I am going into the wilderness to pray for a return of the taste I once possessed for nature, and simple, quiet life. Here I am, one day from Manchester, in the loveliest valley out of Paradise. Ten years ago, before I was an agitator, I spent a day or two in this house. Comparing my sensations now with those I then experienced, I feel how much I have lost in winning public fame. The rough tempest has spoiled for me a quiet haven. I feel I shall never be able to cast anchor again. It seems as if some mesmeric hand were on my brain, or that I was possessed by an unquiet fiend urging me forward in spite of myself.
However disappointed a Member may be in failing to realize his dreams of political ambition and social success, there remains for him the consoling thought—indeed, the great reward—that he has the honour of serving the State, of helping in the management of national affairs, of guiding the destinies of a mighty Commonwealth. No wonder that most Members quit this exalted and historic scene reluctantly, with the deepest regret—aye, with breaking hearts. Should so great a misfortune befall them of being rejected from further service by their constituents at the General Election, they long to return again to the green benches. Complacently to settle down to the humdrum of private life is for many of them impossible.
Even the old and worn agitators who have voluntarily resigned pine to be in the thick of the shoutings of the rival Parties, and the trampings through the division lobbies. There was William Wilberforce, the emancipator of the slaves. Sir Samuel Romilly, who sat in the House of Commons in 1807, when slavery within the British Empire was finally abolished, said of Wilberforce: “He can lay his head upon his pillow and remember that the slave trade was no more.” But was Wilberforce content to be out of Parliament even in his extreme old age? Hannah Macaulay relates that in 1830, while staying at Highwood Hill, the guest of Wilberforce, she got a letter from her brother, enclosing an offer to him from Lord Lansdowne of the seat for the pocket borough of Calne. She showed the communication to Wilberforce. “He was silent for a moment,” she writes, “and then his mobile face lighted up, and he slapped his hand to his ear and cried: ‘Ah! I hear that shout again! Hear, hear! What a life it was!’”