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John Bright was born in Eighteen Hundred Eleven. He was the culminating flower of seven generations of Quaker ancestry. His father was a rich manufacturer at Rochdale, and being a Quaker, did not try the dubious experiment of making his children exempt from useful work in the name of education.
Be it known that John Bright had no part in that aristocratic and somewhat costly invention known as Bright's disease. This was the work of Doctor Richard Bright, a distant kinsman.
The parents of John Bright were both public speakers, and little John was an orator through prenatal tendency. A good plan for parents, or possible parents, to follow is to educate themselves in the interests of posterity, and this without asking that foolish question propounded by an Irish Member of Parliament, "What has posterity ever done for us?"
So this, then, is the recipe for educating your children: Educate yourself.
Beyond this, man inherits himself; he is both ancestor and posterity. I am today what I am because I was what I was last year; and next year I will be what I will be, because I am now what I ata. These were truths which were, very early in life, familiar to John Bright. Before he could speak without a childish lisp, his mother taught him to decide on his own actions. "I don't want to study; can't I go and wade in the brook?" once asked little John of his mother.
"Thee better go into the next room and listen for the Voice, then do as it says," answered the mother.
The boy went into the next room and soon returned, saying, "The Voice says I must study hard for half an hour and then I can go and wade in the brook."
"Very well," was the reply; "we must always obey the Voice."
At this time there was a wave of Socialism sweeping over England, originated largely by Robert Owen, a Welshman, who at the age of nineteen became manager, by divine right, of a Manchester cotton-mill. He was a man of splendid initiative, noble resources, generous impulses.