"
An ingenious man, with an inventive mind, might have managed,
in the same number of lines, to offend more Englishmen than
Bright struck in this sentence; but he must have betrayed
artifice and hurt his oratory. The audience cheered furiously,
and the private secretary felt peace in his much troubled mind,
for he knew how careful the Ministry would be, once they saw
Bright talk republican principles before Trades-Unions; but,
while he did not, like Roebuck, see reason to doubt the courage
of a man who, after quarrelling with the Trades-Unions, quarreled
with all the world outside the Trades-Unions, he did feel a doubt
whether to class Bright as eccentric or conventional. Every one
called Bright "un-English," from Lord Palmerston to William E.
Forster; but to an American he seemed more English than any of
his critics. He was a liberal hater, and what he hated he reviled
after the manner of Milton, but he was afraid of no one. He was
almost the only man in England, or, for that matter, in Europe,
who hated Palmerston and was not afraid of him, or of the press
or the pulpit, the clubs or the bench, that stood behind him. He
loathed the whole fabric of sham religion, sham loyalty, sham
aristocracy, and sham socialism. He had the British weakness of
believing only in himself and his own conventions. In all this,
an American saw, if one may make the distinction, much racial
eccentricity, but little that was personal.
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