have been considered a great traveller, distinct, of course, from the class of explorers; that is, he made himself thoroughly familiar with most or all of the countries of Europe, with various parts of the East, and with the United States and Canada.  He had had a fair, homely education, and he improved it wherever he went by experience, by observation, and by conversation with all manner of men.  He became one of the most effective and persuasive popular speakers ever known in English agitation.  He was not an orator in the highest sense.  He had no imagination and little poetic feeling, nor did genuine passion ever inflame into fervor of declamation his quiet, argumentative style.  But he had humor; he spoke simple, clear, strong English; he used no unnecessary words.  He always made his meaning plain and intelligible, and he had an admirable faculty for illustrating every argument by something drawn from reading or from observation or from experience.  He was, in fact, the very perfection of a common-sense talker, a man fit to deal with men by fair, straightforward argument, to expose complicated sophistries, and to make clear the most perplexed parts of an intricate question.  He was exactly the man for that time, for that question, and for the persuasive and argumentative part of the great controversy which he had undertaken.

Cobden’s chief companion in the struggle was John Bright, whose name has been completely identified with that of Cobden in the repeal of the Corn Laws.  Bright was an orator of the highest order.  He had all the qualifications that make a master of eloquence.  His presence was commanding; his voice was singularly strong and clear, and had peculiar tones and shades in it which gave indescribable meaning to passages of anger, of pity, or of contempt.  His manner was quiet, composed, serene.  He indulged in little or no gesticulation, he had a rich gift of genuine Saxon humor.  These two men, one belonging to the middle class of the North, one sprung from the yeomanry of Southern England, had as a colleague Charles Villiers, a man of high aristocratic family, of marked ability, and of indomitable loyalty to any cause he undertook.  Villiers for some years represented the free-trade cause in Parliament, and Bright and Cobden did its work on the platform.  Cobden first, and Bright after him, became members of the House of Commons, and they were further assisted there by Milner Gibson, a man of position and family, an effective debater, who had been at first a Conservative, but who passed over to the ranks of the Free Traders, and through them to the ranks of the Liberals or Radicals.

Every year Villiers brought on a motion in the House in favor of free trade.  For a long time this motion was only one of the annual performances which, by an apparently inevitable necessity, have to prelude for many years the practical movement of any great parliamentary question.  Villiers might have brought on his annual motion all his life, without getting much nearer to his object, if Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, and other great northern towns had not taken the matter vigorously in hand; if Cobden and Bright had not stirred up the energies of the whole country, and brought clearly home to the mind of every man the plain fact that reason, argument, and arithmetic, as well as freedom and justice, were distinctly on their side.