His first efforts, after entering Parliament, were directed to the repeal of the Corn-Laws, in which beneficent measure he cooeperated with such men as Charles P. Villiers, brother of Lord Clarendon, Lord Morpeth, now Earl of Carlisle, Lord John Russell, and his friend, Mr. Richard Cobden.  Sir Robert Peel, who was at that time Prime Minister, had always adhered to the protective doctrines of Pitt and Wellington; and it was mainly due to the clear and cogent reasoning of Bright and his associates, that the illustrious statesman at the head of the Treasury finally yielded, with a magnanimity never surpassed in the annals of ministerial history, to the enlightened policy of free trade in respect to corn.  The distress which had for years resulted from the stringent enactments of Lord Liverpool’s government to the lower class, was, by this patriotic sacrifice of the first minister, done away with; and not least among those who contributed to the accomplishment of so auspicious a result, we must reckon the subject of this sketch.  The Tory party, headed by such chiefs as Wellington and Lyndhurst, in the Lords, and Stanley and Disraeli, in the Commons, made a stern and pertinacious resistance to the repeal; and no one was more feared by the intellectual giants of that party than was Bright.  His severe wit, his plain, blunt manner of exposing the defects of his opponents, and his impulsive and overwhelming declamation, were hardly exceeded by the fluent exuberance of Stanley and the keen sarcasm of the Hebrew novelist, Disraeli.

While he generally acted with the party of which Lord Russell and Lord Landsdowne were the chiefs, he did not place himself supinely under the dictation of the caucus-room.  Professing to be bound by the precepts of no faction, acting frequently with the conservatives, although oftener with the liberals, independent of ministerial control, and disdaining to attain power by the sacrifice of any principle, he was excluded from a participation in the government, when those with whom he in general sympathized succeeded to the administration in 1846.  He early adopted ultra-liberal views, and has always been known as the advocate of universal suffrage, the separation of Church and State, and the diminution of the influence of hereditary nobles; and although he could not but be aware that many of his doctrines were repugnant to those of his auditors, and a majority of his countrymen, he has not hesitated to uphold and express them with great perseverance and ingenuousness.

Had he lived in the days of Russell and Sidney, he had perhaps shared their fate, and paid the penalty of unpopular politics on the scaffold.  That bold spirit which he has ever manifested, exciting his great talents in the advocacy of repugnant theories, would not have feared the restraints which a ruder age encouraged despotic kings to put upon freedom of political action.  Luckily, he has been living in an age which respects independent thought and proscribes the conscience of no man.  While he is certainly premature in his theories of equality, the tendency of popular feeling is toward him rather than from him.  Tory policy to-day was Whig policy a century ago.  Walpole would have sustained the younger Pitt, and Derby and Lyndhurst will hardly dispute the benefits of the reform of 1832.