BRIGHT, JOHN (1811-1889), British statesman, was born at Rochdale on Nov. 16, 1811 of Quaker stock. His father, Jacob Bright had started a cotton-mill at Rochdale in 1809; his mother, Martha Wood, Jacob Bright's second wife, was a woman of great strength of character and refined taste. John being a delicate child, was sent as a day-scholar to a boarding-school near his home. A year at the Ackworth school, two years at a school at York, and a year and a half at Newton, near Clitheroe, completed his education. He learned, he himself said, but little Latin and Greek, but acquired a love of English literature. In his 16th year he entered his father's mill, and in due time became a partner in the business. Two agitations were then going on in Rochdale— the first (in which Jacob Bright was a leader) in opposition to a local church-rate, and the second for parliamentary reform, by which Rochdale successfully claimed to have a member al lotted to it under the Reform bill. In both these movements John Bright took part. He was an ardent Nonconformist, proud to number among his ancestors John Gratton, a friend of George Fox, and one of the persecuted and imprisoned preachers of the Society of Friends. His political interest was probably first kindled by the Preston election in 183o, in which Lord Stanley, after a long struggle, was defeated by "Orator" Hunt. Bright was one of the founders of the Rochdale Literary and Philosophical Society, took a leading part in its debates, and on returning from a holiday journey in the East, gave the society a lecture on his travels. He first met Richard Cobden in 1836 or 1837. Cobden urged him to speak against the Corn laws. His first speech on the Corn laws was made at Rochdale in 1838, and in the same year he joined the Manchester provisional committee which in founded the Anti-Corn Law league. He was still only the local public man, taking part in all public movements, especially in opposition to John Feilden's proposed factory legislation, and to the Rochdale church-rate. In 1839 he married Elizabeth, daughter of Jonathan Priestman of Newcastle-on-Tyne. A daughter, Helen, was born to them; but the young wife, after a long illness, died of consumption in Sept. 1841. Three days after her death at Leamington, Cobden called to see him. Cobden spoke some words of condolence, but "after a time he looked up and said, `There are thousands of homes in England at this moment where wives, mothers and children are dying of hunger. Now, when the first paroxysm of your grief is past, I would advise you to come with me, and we will never rest till the Corn laws are repealed.' I ac cepted his invitation," added Bright, "and from that time we never ceased to labour hard on behalf of the resolution which we had made." At the general election in 1841 Cobden was returned for Stock port, and in 1843 Bright was the Free Trade candidate at a by election at Durham. He was defeated, but his successful com petitor was unseated on petition, and at the second contest Bright was returned. He took his seat in the House of Commons on July 28, 1843 in an atmosphere of suspicion and hostility, due to the reputation he had gained in the last two years as the most formidable agitator against the Corn laws. Wherever John Bright was announced as the speaker vast crowds assembled, for he had the passion which Cobden lacked. His "more stately genius," as Mr. John Morley called it, was already making him the undisputed master of the feelings of his audiences. In the House of Commons his progress was slower. Cobden's argumentative speeches were regarded more sympathetically than Bright's more rhetorical appeals, and in a debate on Villiers's annual motion against the Corn laws Bright was heard with so much impatience that he was obliged to sit down. In the next session (1845) he moved for an inquiry into the operation of the Game laws. At a meeting of county members earlier in the day Peel had advised them not to be led into discussion by a violent speech from the member for Durham, but to let the committee be granted without debate. Bright was not violent, and Cobden said that he did his work admirably, and won golden opinions from all men. The speech established his position in the House of Commons.
In this session Bright and Cobden came into opposition, Cob den voting for the Maynooth Grant and Bright against it. On only one other occasion—a vote for South Kensington—did they go into opposite lobbies during twenty-five years of parliamentary life. In the autumn of 1845 Bright retained Cobden in the public career to which Cobden had invited him four years before. Bright was in Scotland when a letter came from Cobden announc ing his determination, forced on him by business difficulties, to retire from public work. Bright replied that if Cobden retired the mainspring of the league was gone, and a few days later set off for Manchester, posting in that wettest of autumns through "the rain that rained away the Corn laws." On his arrival he raised the money which tided Cobden over the emergency. The crisis of the struggle had come. The bad harvest and the potato disease drove him to the repeal of the Corn laws, and at a meeting in Manchester on July 2, 1846 Cobden moved and Bright seconded a motion dissolving the league. A library of twelve hundred volumes was presented to Bright as a memorial of the struggle.
Bright married, in June 1847, Margaret Leatham, of Wake field, by whom he had seven children. In the succeeding July he was elected for Manchester, with Milner Gibson, without a con test. In the new parliament, as in the previous session, he op posed legislation restricting the hours of labour, and as a Non conformist, spoke against clerical control of national education. In 1848 he voted for Hume's household suffrage motion, and in troduced a bill for the repeal of the Game laws. When Lord John Russell brought forward his Ecclesiastical Titles bill, Bright op posed it as "a little, paltry, miserable measure," and foretold its failure.
In a speech in favour of the government bill for a rate in aid in 1849, he won loud cheers from both sides, and was com plimented by Disraeli for having sustained the reputation of that assembly. From this time forward he had the ear of the House, and took effective part in the debates. He spoke against capital punishment, against church-rates, against flogging in the army, and against the Irish Established Church. He supported Cob den's motion for the reduction of public expenditure, and in and out of parliament pleaded for peace. In the election of 1852 he was again returned for Manchester on the principles of free trade, electoral reform and religious freedom. But war was in the air, and the most impassioned speeches he ever delivered were ad dressed to this parliament in fruitless opposition to the Crimean war. Neither Lhe House nor the country would listen. "I went to the House on Monday," wrote Macaulay in March 1854, "and heard Bright say everything I thought ; and I heard Palmerston and Graham expose themselves lamentably." His most memo rable speech, the greatest he ever made, was delivered on Feb. 23, 1855. "The angel of death has been abroad throughout the land. You may almost hear the beating of his wings," he said, and con cluded with an appeal to the prime minister that moved the House as it had never been moved within living memory.
Bright was disqualified by illness during the whole of 1856 and 1857. In Palmerston's penal dissolution in the latter year, Bright was rejected by Manchester, but in August, while ill and absent, Birmingham elected him without a contest. He returned to parliament in 1858, and in February seconded the motion which threw out Lord Palmerston's government. Lord Derby thereupon came into office for the second time, and Bright had the satisfac tion of assisting in the passing of two measures which he had long advocated—the admission of Jews to parliament and the transfer of the government of India from the East India Company to the Crown. In October he addressed his new constituents, and started a movement for parliamentary reform. He spoke at great gather ings at Edinburgh, Glasgow, Bradford and Manchester, and for the next nine years he was the protagonist of Reform. In the de bate& on the Reform bills submitted to the House of Commons from 1859 to 1867, Bright's was the most influential voice. He rebuked Lowe's "Botany Bay view," and described Horsman as retiring to his "political cave of Adullam," and hooking in Lowe. "The party of two," he said, "reminds me of the Scotch terrier, which was so covered with hair that you could not tell which was the head and which was the tail." These and similar phrases, such as the excuse for withdrawing the Reform bill in the year of the great budget of 186o—"you cannot get twenty wagons at once through Temple Bar"—were in all men's mouths. Bright's ora tory constantly produced these popular cries. The phrase "a free breakfast table" was his; and on the rejection of Forster's Com pensation for Disturbance bill he used the phrase as to Irish dis content, "Force is not a remedy." During his great reform agitation Bright had vigorously sup ported Cobden in the negotiations for the treaty of commerce with France, and had taken the side of the North in the discus sions in England on the American Civil War. He had a profound admiration for Abraham Lincoln, as an inscription written by him on a copy of Lincoln's portrait shows : "And if there be on earth and among men any `Divine' right to govern, surely it rests with the Ruler so chosen and so appointed." (Dec. 4, i 86i .) He be lieved that the government of the United States rested more than any other, on the free choice of a free people. No Englishman of his time was so outspoken on the Alabama case as Bright. It is interesting to read his conception of the future of the American continent. "I should say that if a man had a great heart within him, he would rather look forward to the day when, from that point of land which is habitable nearest to the Pole, to the shores of the Great Gulf, the whole of that vast continent might become one great confederation of States—without a great army and without a great navy, not mixing itself up with the entanglements of European politics, without a custom-house inside, through the whole length and breadth of its territory, and with freedom every where, equality everywhere, law everywhere, peace everywhere— such a confederation would afford at least some hope that man is not forsaken of Heaven, and that the future of our race may be better than the past." (Speech at Rochdale, Nov. z 86I .) In March 1865 Cobden died, and Bright told the House of Commons he dared not even attempt to express the feelings which oppressed him, and sat down overwhelmed with grief. Their friendship was one of the most characteristic features of the public life of their time. "After twenty years of intimate and almost brotherly friendship with him," said Bright, "I little knew how much I loved him till I had lost him." In June 1865 parliament was dis solved, and Bright was returned for Birmingham without opposi tion. Palmerston's death in the early autumn brought Lord John Russell into power, and for the first time Bright gave his support to the government. Russell's fourth Reform bill was introduced, was defeated by the Adullamites, and the Derby-Disraeli ministry was installed. Bright declared Lord Derby's accession to be a declaration of war against the working classes, and roused the great towns in the demand for reform. Bright was the popular hero of the time. The winter of 1866-67 was the culminating point in his career as a political leader. The Disraeli Reform bill was carried. Lord Cranborne (3rd marquis of Salisbury), who had resigned from the Government when he saw the text of the Bill, remarked that "if the adoption of the principles of Mr. Bright be a triumph, then the Conservative party, in the whole history of its previous annals, has won no triumph so signal as this." In the autumn of 1868 Bright, with two Liberal colleagues, was again returned for Birmingham. Mr. Gladstone came into power with a programme of Irish reform in church and land such as Bright had long urged, and he accepted the post of president of the Board of Trade. He made a great speech on the second reading of the Irish Church bill, and wrote a letter on the House of Lords, in which he said, "In harmony with the nation they may go on for a long time, but throwing themselves athwart its course they may meet with accidents not pleasant for them to think of." He also spoke strongly in the same session in favour of the bill per mitting marriage with a deceased wife's sister. A severe illness compelled his retirement and kept him out of public life for four years. In August 1873 Mr. Gladstone reconstructed his cabinet, and Bright returned to it as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster. But he was now an old man. In the election in January 1874 Bright and his colleagues were returned for Birmingham without opposition. When Mr. Gladstone resigned the leadership of his party in 1875, Bright was chairman of the party meeting which chose Lord Hartington as his successor. He took a less prominent part in political discussion, till the Eastern Question brought Great Britain to the verge of war with Russia, and his old energy flamed up afresh. In the debate on the vote of credit in February 1878, he urged the government not to increase the difficulties manufacturers had in finding employment for their workpeople by any single word or act which could shake confidence in busi ness. The debate lasted five days. On the fifth day a telegram from Mr. Layard (afterwards Sir Austen, q.v.) was published an nouncing that the Russians were nearing Constantinople. In both Houses Mr. Layard's despatch was read, and in the excited Com mons Mr. Forster's resolution opposing the vote of credit was withdrawn. Bright, however, distrusted the ambassador at the Porte, and gave reasons for doubting the alarming telegram. While he was speaking a note was put into the hands of Sir Stafford Northcote, and when Bright sat down he read it to the House. It was a confirmation from the Russian prime minister of Bright's doubts : "There is not a word of truth in the rumours which have reached you." At the general election in 188o he was re-elected at Birmingham, and joined Mr. Gladstone's new govern ment as chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster. For two sessions he spoke and voted with his colleagues; he supported Forster's Coercion bill in 1881, believing that without it a Land bill could not be got through parliament. But after the bombardment of the Alexandria forts he left the ministry and never held office again. He, however, gave a general support to Mr. Gladstone's government. In June 1883 he was the object of an unparalleled demonstration at Birmingham to celebrate his 25 years of service as its representative. At this celebration he spoke strongly of "the Irish rebel party," and accused the Conservatives of "alli ance" with them, but withdrew the imputation when Sir Stafford Northcote moved that such language was a breach of the privi leges of the House of Commons. At a banquet to Lord Spencer he accused the Irish members of having "exhibited a boundless sympathy for criminals and murderers." He refused in the House of Commons to apologize for these words, and was supported in his refusal by both sides of the House. At the Birmingham elec tion in 1885 he stood for the central division of the redistributed constituency ; he was opposed by Lord Randolph Churchill, but was elected by a large majority. In the new parliament he voted against the Home Rule bill, and in the election of 1886 which followed its defeat, when he was re-elected without opposition, his letters told with fatal effect against the Home Rule Liberals. He suggested that the Irish members should form a grand com mittee to which every Irish bill should go after first reading. But though he was himself a dissentient, the break-up of the Liberal party filled him with gloom. His last speech at Birming ham was on March 29, i888, at a banquet to celebrate Mr. Cham berlain's return from his peace mission to the United States. He spoke of imperial federation as a "dream and an absurdity." In May his illness returned, he took to his bed in October, and died on March 27, 1889. He was buried in the graveyard of the meet ing-house of the Society of Friends in Rochdale.
The 3rd marquess of Salisbury said of him, and it sums up his character as a public man : "He was the greatest master of Eng lish oratory that this generation—I may say several generations— has seen. . . . At a time when much speaking has depressed, has almost exterminated eloquence, he maintained that robust, power ful and vigorous style in which he gave fitting expression to the burning and noble thoughts he desired to utter." See Speeches on Parliamentary Reform by John Bright, M.P., revised by Himself (z 866) ; Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, by John Bright, M.P., ed. J. E. Thorold Rogers (1868) ; Public Ad dresses, ed. J. E. Thorold Rogers (1879) ; G. Barnett Smith, The Life and Speeches of the Right Hon. John Bright, M.P. (1881) ; Public Letters of the Right Hon. John Bright, M.P., collected by H. J. Leech (1885) ; Barry O'Brien, John Bright (Iwo); G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (1913, 2nd ed. 1925).