JOHN BRIGHT
Tribune
The word 'tribune' comes to us from the early days of the Roman Republic; and even in Rome the tribunate was unlike all other magistracies. The holder had no outward signs of office, no satellites to execute his commands, no definite department to administer like the consul or the praetor. It was his first function to protest on behalf of the poorer citizens against the violent exercise of authority, and, on certain occasions, to thwart the action of other magistrates. He was to be the champion of the weak and helpless against the privileged orders; and his power depended on his courage, his eloquence, and the prestige of his office. England has no office of the sort in her constitutional armoury; but the word 'tribune' expresses, better than any other title, the position occupied in our political life by many of the men who have been the conspicuous champions of liberty, and few would contest the claim of John Bright to a foremost place among them. He, too, stood forth to vindicate the rights of the plebs; he, too, resisted the will of governments; and in no common measure did he give evidence, through forty years of public life, of the possession of the highest eloquence and the highest courage.
john bright
From the painting by W. W. Ouless in the National Portrait Gallery
His early life gave little promise of a great career. He was born in 1811, the son of Jacob Bright, of Rochdale, who had risen by his own efforts to the ownership of a small cotton-mill in Lancashire, a man of simple benevolence and genuine piety, and a member of the Society of Friends—a society more familiar to us under the name of Quakers, though this name is not employed by them in speaking of themselves.
The boy left home early, and between the ages of eight and fifteen he was successively a pupil at five Quaker schools in the north of England. Here he enjoyed little comfort, and none of the aristocratic seclusion in which most statesmen have been reared at Eton and Harrow. He rubbed shoulders with boys of various degrees of rank and wealth, and learnt to be simple, true, and serious-minded; but he was in no way remarkable at this age. We hear little of his recreations, and still less of his reading; the school which pleased him most and did him most good was the one which he attended last, lying among the moors on the borders of Lancashire and Yorkshire. In the river Hodder he learnt to swim; still more he learnt to fish, and it was fishing which remained his favourite outdoor pastime throughout his life.
When school-days were over—at the age of fifteen—there was no question of the University: a rigorous life awaited him and he began at once to work in his father's business. The mill stood close beside his father's house at Greenbank near Rochdale, some ten miles northward from Manchester, and had been built in 1809 by Jacob Bright, out of a capital lent to him by two members of the Society of Friends. Here he received bales of new cotton by canal or from carriers, span it in his mill, and gave out the warp and weft thus manufactured to handloom weavers, whom he paid by the piece to weave it in the weaving chamber at the top of their own houses. He then sold the fully manufactured article in Manchester or elsewhere. In such surroundings, many a clever boy has developed into a hard-headed prosperous business man; material interests have cased in his soul, and he has been content to limit his thoughts to buying and selling, to the affairs of his factory and his town, and he has heard no call to other fields of work. But John Bright's education in books and in life was only just beginning, and though it may be regrettable that he missed the leisured freedom of university life, we must own that he really made good the loss by his own effort (and that without neglecting the work of the mill), and thereby did much to strengthen the independence of his character.
In the mill he was the earliest riser, and often spent hours before breakfast at his books. History and poetry were his favourite reading, and periodicals dealing with social and political questions; his taste was severe and had the happiest effect in chastening his oratorical style. To him, as to the earnest Puritans of the seventeenth century, the Bible and Milton were a peculiar joy; no other stories were so moving, no other music so thrilling to the ear. In his family there was no want of good talk. His mother, who died in 1830, was a woman of great gifts, who helped largely in developing the minds of her children. After her death John continued to live with his sisters, who were clever and original in mind, becoming the leader in the home circle, where views were freely exchanged on the questions of the day.