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• Preface
• The Manchester School of Economics
• Introduction: Manchester Revisited
• 1: What the School Was
• 2: The Economists and the School
• 3: The Corn Laws
• 4: The Campaign For Repeal
• 5: Why the Laws Were Repealed
• 6: The School After Repeal
• Bibliography
• I.: The School, Its Leaders, and the Ideas
• II.: The Repeal Campaign
• The League
• The Struggle
• III.: The Period, the People, and Their Ideas
• The Economist
• The Non-conformist
• IV.: The Economists On the Corn Laws

6

The School after Repeal

The League was suspended on July 4, 1846, and never again did the Manchester School have as effective an organization for propagating its ideas. In 1852, the protectionists made a flourish at restoring the corn laws, and the League reassembled briefly, displaying so much truculence and money that the attempt was abandoned. The momentum of repeal brought the complete abolition of the Navigation Acts in 1854. They were the last important restriction on trade, and had been defended in The Wealth of Nations, it may be recalled, on grounds that “defence . . . is of much more importance than opulence.” Their repeal probably was a more significant change in economic policy than was the repeal of the corn laws, because it was more clearly a measure which could or did reduce national power. The subordination of power to other aims was a characteristic that set the Manchester School apart from the classic liberals. The liberals, as far as I know, always put power before wealth when the two were clearly incompatible.

When the choice was put before the Manchester School the businessmen chose wealth and the pacifists chose neither if both were bellicose. The businessmen favored the assertion of power if it was to serve their interests, as when, in 1822, upon learning that Spain intended to invade Mexico, where they had investments, they petitioned the House “for the protection of the property of the merchants of this Country,” and again, in 1848, when they asked the Foreign Secretary to use his influence to lift the Danish blockade of the Elbe because the blockade was causing “distress to the manufacturing districts of this country.”1 They opposed national power when it did not serve them, as it did not in the Navigation Acts, which increased their shipping costs. They usually tried to prove that whatever increased their wealth also increased the nation’s power or to prove that the two were entirely compatible. It may have been that the repeal of the Navigation Acts did not lessen Britain’s power, because its costs of ship construction and operation may have been as low as those abroad. “But English ships and sailors can now navigate as cleaply as those of any other country; . . . The ends which may once have justified Navigation Laws require them no longer,” Mill wrote about 1848. However that may have been, it seems most probable that the businessmen would have opposed the acts even if the acts were protective, because they were opposed to other protective laws which raised their costs or lessened the demand for their product. The view of the Chamber (1846) is Olympian in its indifference to the political importance of the acts: “Of all the monopolies by which consumers of this country have been oppressed, none have a more ancient date, or have been more densely surrounded by the haze of prejudice, than our Navigation Laws.”2

No so the pacifists. They were alive to the political consequences, and they chose wealth over power because they believed free trade would make war intolerably expensive, not because they wanted to enrich the nation and certainly not because they wanted to enrich the manufacturers. Whenever free trade had a bellicose effect, they opposed it, and they then declared themselves against both wealth and power. Such a circumstance arose in 1850 when the Russian government sought to borrow money in the London market to purchase armaments. Codden opposed the loan. The free traders were puzzled, and the protectionists were delighted. “No free trade in cutting throats,” he explained. He elaborated upon his view by recalling a conversation he supposedly had with a financier whose view was that the use to which any loan was put was immaterial so long as the principal and interest were secure.

When the Crimean War began in 1854, Bright and Cobden opposed it. Their popularity declined, but they held to their principle. The businessmen had no taste for pacifism, and gave their erstwhile leaders no support. The middle-class radicals were most of them patriotic in this instance. The Philosophic Radicals supported the adventure; a few had, indeed, become members of the government. They were denounced by Cobden and Bright as turncoats, and they replied in kind. In 1857 Britain was flagrantly aggressive in China in the Lorca Arrow incident. The pacifists put the issue before the House, and by a narrow vote caused the government to fall. In the general election which followed, Cobden and Bright were badly defeated. Greville’s comment is worth quoting in full:

In time they found constituencies again, but their return to Parliament—Bright’s in 1857 and Cobden’s in 1859—was not in the heroic manner of their election in 1847.

After 1846 there was not the reduction in tariffs among Britain’s customers which the League had predicted would be one of the consequences of repeal. The manufacturers prevailed upon Palmerston to send Cobden to France in 1859 to persuade Napoleon III to make a commercial treaty with Britain. Cobden did not want to go; the French, he said, did not understand economics. In time, however, he agreed, and the episode is another instructive example of the power of an idea and of Cobden’s mastery of it. In all Europe there was no less promising a candidate for conversion to free trade than the Emperor, unless it was the Tsar (although his court earlier had been much taken by Harriet Martineau’s parables on laisser faire). Cobden had first to persuade the Emperor that the proposal was not meant to lessen the power of France, which was less difficult for Cobden than for anyone else to do because he was known to be a pacifist and a formidable opponent of Palmerston’s foreign policy. He had then to convert the Emperor to free trade, which took some doing, and finally to persuade him that it was a politically feasible policy, which took even more because the Emperor believed (with reason, it turned out) that his regime was not altogether popular.

Cobden had broached such a treaty in 1849 when he was in Paris for a peace congress organized by pacifists. He and Frédéric Bastiat called on the French Minister of Finance, Passy, “a sound political economist and intelligent statesman,” i.e., a free trader. “He made difficulties,” Cobden noted. He told Passy that only after two or three more finance ministers had been sacrificed to the futile effort to raise revenue could they expect someone to come forward with the proposal to reduce armament expenditure.5 When he returned in 1859, a mutual arms reduction was a part of his object, though a purely private, and perhaps secret, part because the British government gave him no authority at all on this point. Cobden indeed was embarrassed during the negotiations by the saber-rattling in Palmerston’s speeches.

“I had to give him the first lessons in political economy,” he said about his initial meeting with Napoleon III, which took place in October 1859. He apparently was quite good at theory, because in a few weeks they were discussing how the French people might be brought around to the principle. Napoleon was not at all impressed by the notion that free trade was a political reform. “We make revolutions in France, not reforms,” he told Cobden. He wanted the treaty to be submitted to the Corps Legislatif for approval, and then Cobden became adamant. “But governments are opposed to a simplification of their proceedings, or to bringing them under those rules of common sense which control the acts of every day life,” he noted. Cobden insisted that the Emperor stand by his initial promise to negotiate the treaty himself, and told him that he would have great support from the merchants and manufacturers. The Emperor was dubious, and needed bucking up. In the spring of 1860, Cobden met with some influential Frenchmen, and they organized the Free Trade Society; its object was “to insure a moderate scale of duties, and to counter-act the efforts of the protectionists to maintain prohibitive duties.”

During the negotiations, the political side of foreign policy kept intruding. Cobden told the Emperor that the businessmen of France and Britain would keep the two countries at peace “so long as it is their interest to do so,” but that if defense expenditures on each side continued to increase, the businessmen would come to think that war would be cheaper and, “on economical grounds,” rightly so. He proposed that the leading capitalists of both countries sign a declaration calling for both to reduce their military expenditures. He was, as usual, driven by his pacifism, which he once called his “monomania,” for in the midst of negotiating the details of a new tariff schedule he found time to urge disarmament upon the ministers of the French government and to meet with pacifist groups. He was particularly pleased that the leader of the Saint-Simonians had changed the Roman maxim “If you would preserve peace prepare for war,” to “If you would preserve peace prepare for peace.”6

The treaty was at length concluded. There were few who could withstand Cobden’s powers of persuasion, and Napoleon III was not one of them. He was persuaded to adopt the principle of free trade even though he believed the people did not want it. Peel, it will be remembered, had to be persuaded to adopt it because the people did want it. The treaty reduced duties substantially on both sides, trade increased, and the businessmen of Lancashire were well pleased. They raised £41,000, and gave it to Cobden as an expression of their gratitude. The treaty was the last major success of the Manchester School in the field of commercial policy.

Soon after it was signed, the Civil War began in the United States, and the pacifism of the school was put to another great test. The school has been called one of the forces that prevented Britain from intervening on behalf of the South. It was, but it appears to have been less of a preventive force than was the increase in cotton imports from India and Egypt. At the start of the war, the leaders each took their characteristic positions. Cobden deplored the war in its entirety, condemned both sides for “the senseless and unscientific butchery,” was rather more censorious of the North because of its greater military power, and he believed the only solution to be a permanent separation into two nations. Until that happened he would support the South. Bright’s position was much different. His Quaker principles were more strongly opposed to slavery than they were to war, and far beyond this he saw in the Civil War a contest between the democratic masses of the North and the landed aristocracy of the South. “It is not our war,” he said in 1861; “we did not make it. We deeply lament it . . . but I do not know that we are called upon to shut our eyes and to close our hearts to the great issues which are depending upon it.”7

The great issues to Bright were not, as some historians would have it, the conflicts between industrial capitalism and quasi-feudal agriculture, but those inherent in the contest between democracy and privilege, the privilege of those who got their wealth from business as well as of those who got it from the land. “Privilege,” he said before a great meeting of the trade unions in London in 1863, “has beheld thirty millions of men, happy and prosperous, without emperor, without king, without the surroundings of a court, without nobles, except such as are made by eminence in intellect and virtue, without State bishops and State priests,” and privilege had tried to turn the clock back. His listeners approved. One was Marx. “I attended the meeting held by Bright,” he wrote Engels. “He looked quite the Independent and every time he said, ‘In the United States no kings, no bishops,’ there was a burst of applause.”8 It made up a bit for Bright’s “cowardly” opposition to the Crimean War. In the House (1863), Bright warned against placing any confidence in the industrialists of the North who, he said, might well sacrifice the principles at issue by accepting peace on the South’s terms: “the rich commercial classes in all countries . . . from the uncertainty of their possessions and fluctuations of their interests, are rendered always timid and almost always corrupt.”9

He brought Cobden around to his opinion, but Cobden continued to regret the bloodshed. About pacifism there was an important and curious difference between them. Cobden was near to believing in complete nonviolent resistance in all conflicts, and for a practicing politician he was remarkably consistent in regulating his public behavior by this private principle. He was not as successful in adhering to some of his other ideas, and there were occasions on which he was disingenuous. Bright was much more candid, less agreeable, and less persuasive, but about the principle of nonresistance he refused to declare himself. He thought there were a few cases “in which there seems to Christian and rational men no escape” from war. In answer to a correspondent who asked if he were opposed to war in principle, he said, “I advise you not to trouble yourself with the abstract question. The practical question is the one which presses,” and that is how to avoid the wars which are avoidable, as, he said, most of them are.10 His decision in the Civil War was even more practical: the war had begun, and one had to choose sides. His choice was swift and clear; and it was consistent with the political purpose that directed him in the free-trade campaign.

The businessmen, who had been so important a part of the school, were divided and doubtful in their view of the war. They had an understandable affinity to the industrial system of the North, and they also had a quite important interest in getting cotton from the South in order to operate their mills. The workers were sympathetic to the North (for the same reason Bright was), but contemporary accounts show them to have been less resolute than the history books of a later period have made them. Soon after the war started the cotton shortage reduced the operation of the mills to one day a week, and the hardship was greater even than that of the ’forties. The Chamber examined numerous ways of increasing cotton imports from other sources, such as Egypt, Turkey, India, Brazil, and Australia; and it called upon the government for assistance whenever needed, despite a feeling that such aid was inconsistent with “sound economical principles.” Henry Ashworth, the Chamber’s president in 1864, commended the governments of Turkey and Egypt for having given “a description of encouragement to cultivation similar to that afforded in this country by agricultural societies,—not protection exactly, but such information and encouragement for the growth of cotton as it was becoming in their part to offer, and those countries had reaped large advantages thereby.”11

“A description of encouragement” was a euphemism indeed for the policies which the Chamber urged the government to apply in India. Early in 1861, the Chamber held a conference on Indian affairs. It discussed whether or not a loan should be floated to finance public works—like roads, canals, and railways—in India, which would facilitate trade. The Board proposed and the meeting adopted a resolution calling for an annual loan of five to six million pounds to complete the transportation projects that had been stopped. In the discussion, one member declared that the scarcity of cotton was almost as serious as the scarcity of corn had been. The meeting also adopted a resolution calling for a reduction of military expenditure in India, because that spending had created a financial stringency which forced the government to abandon the public works program. The meeting deprecated the Indian tariff on foreign manufactures and the effort of the Indians to industrialize. One participant was reported as saying he thought they might be “accused of selfishness on this question, in endeavoring to prevent India from becoming a manufacturing country. But he thought they [the Indians] were doing wrong in giving an impetus to the introduction of machinery into India, their natural trade being the production of the raw material.” A resolution was adopted which said that Indian duties on manufactured textiles were “in effect equivalent to a highly restrictive duty on the export of cotton, and consequently a discouragement of its growth in that country.” The president of the Chamber at that time, Edmund Potter, said the resolution itself would answer any charge of selfishness.12 But two years later at the Chamber’s annual meeting, John Cheetham, a businessman, wanted to know, “What advantage is India to us if we cannot create her into a great competitor with America?” He wanted India made into that by whatever means were necessary, and the next year he said that “if India was to be left to private enterprise he had no confidence in it.” He proposed that the British government undertake to increase cotton output there, and declared he hoped for something better than “the usual stale answer, namely that it was contrary to the rules of political economy.”13

It was by securing cotton from outside America that the businessmen hoped to keep their mills at work and so avoid having to declare themselves on the Civil War. In its annual report for 1861, the Board explained that it was forced to refrain from expressing itself on the war “by the extreme difficulty of separating the commercial from the political part of the question,” and it called upon its successor to make a declaration. Potter urged that an appeal be made to the businessmen of the North “to stop this useless slaughter,” and he implied that peace was possible by making secession permanent. Thomas Bazely, an M.P., repudiated Potter’s implication and denounced the idea of Britain’s recognizing the South.14

Slowly the imports of cotton from other areas increased, and it was of kinds that required more labor for being worked into textiles. Thus, employment increased more than output, and the position of the working class improved somewhat. Early in 1864, Ashworth said that cotton imports were sufficient to keep the mills operating three days a week and that by the end of the year they would be working four and a half days. It has been said that the Emancipation Proclamation stiffened the pro-Northern views of the English working class, made it willing to bear the hardship of unemployment, and hence prevented the British government from intervening on the side of the South. Lincoln issued the Proclamation in September 1862, and it was made effective at the start of the next year. The Chamber held its annual meeting in January 1863, and the report shows there was much restiveness among both the employers and the workers over the policy of the British government. In 1864, when the mills were operating at from one-half to three-fourths capacity, the restiveness had subsided, the criticism of the government was negligible, and there was no talk of intervention. Whether the freeing of the slaves in itself prevented British intervention, one cannot say. One can say that the act had much greater force in England as raw cotton came in larger quantities from outside America.

Cobden died in 1865, and with his death there went, according to the Spectator, “the most sensitive insight into the true spirit of commercial liberty, which the ‘pure middle class’ has ever produced.” Disraeli was much nearer the truth when in his eulogy he said Cobden was “close, coherent, sometimes even subtle.” A few years later there was a noticeable decline in those ideas of the Manchester School which he represented. During his life he kept alive and vigorous the opposition to an aggressive foreign policy, to the balance of power, to colonies, and to imperial expansion. The pacifists drew upon his influence to advance their program for disarmament and the arbitration of international disputes, and it was to this program that he gave more attention and to which he put more effort than to any other among the multitude of causes with which he was associated after 1846. Yet he never was able to secure from the businessmen the support for pacifism that they gave to free trade. One can follow the logic of free trade to its eventual outcome in a peaceful, stateless world. The logic needs some time to work itself out, and businessmen, like governments, live in the present; and their interests (again like those of governments) often can be advanced by an aggressive foreign policy. Being dependent on imports of raw materials and the foreign demand for their product, their interests were more often promoted by men like Palmerston than like Cobden. I have described how the Chamber repeatedly called upon the government to turn its foreign policy toward promoting the textile industry, except in the matter of the corn laws. It could be bold enough, indeed brazen, when there was no danger of provoking a great domestic interest like the landed proprietors. It displayed no timidity at all when, for example, it asked the foreign office to lift the Danish blockade of the Elbe so that British goods could get through. In The Manchester Politician, Gerald B. Hertz described the consistency between the ideas of foreign policy expressed by the Manchester businessnessmen and their economic interests. He would have us believe that the school’s ideas were dictated entirely by those economic interests, and that is making far too much of them because the businessmen alone did not direct the school. He was, however, altogether right in saying that their ideas were trimmed to their statements of profit and loss. They did not always get from the government the policy they wanted, but they usually asked for it. It is paradoxical that the most famous of the Manchester politicians, Cobden, should have been so unlike Manchester on an issue—pacifism—which he repeatedly said directed his public conduct. Hertz noticed the anomaly, but thought it of no importance. There is a visible expression of it in Manchester on St. Ann’s Square. At one end there is a statue of Cobden and at the other end a war memorial. Each has its back to the other, and whoever placed them there was remarkably obtuse or very subtle.

Bright survived Cobden by 24 years, and continued to be directed by “the ulterior measure” just as surely as he was during the free-trade campaign. It was to increase the political power of “the people . . . the middle and industrious classes.”15 In the House he put forward the radical view of parliamentary reform, but accepted the gradual measures of Gladstone. He saw aspects of the franchise in almost every problem to which he turned after the repeal of the corn laws, as he had seen it there. He advised the workers that unions were useless and even mischievous if the workers did not have political representation. He would not commit himself on the principle of an income tax, and would only say that it was the inevitable result of limiting political power to the extravagant rich. Even on the troublesome problem of emigration he saw a solution in the franchise. Emigration, he said, would be unnecessary in a country that was well governed, and for that the franchise was essential. His ideas were called “democratic” or “republican,” at a time when those words had a subversive connotation. His biographer, Trevelyan, tried very hard to show they were undeserved. His subject was not, Trevelyan said, a “low Jack Cade” (a notorious rebel in early English history). There was, however, reason for his contemporaries to think his opinions were, to say the least, advanced. “The class which has hitherto ruled in this country has failed miserably. It revels in power and wealth, whilst at its feet, a terrible peril for its future, lies the multitude which it has neglected,” he said. He spoke of the House of Lords as that “exalted place” populated by “exalted persons,” and declared that it must be abolished. As he enlarged upon the aristocracy, he disclosed (should anyone have wondered) that “I have no great opinion of Bishops,” and he spoke of “fat, sleek deans.” His anticlericalism was made known in his effort to disestablish the Irish (Anglican) Church. He came to be regarded as an opponent of the monarchy, and occasionally was spoken of, only half in humor, as the first President of Great Britain.

Bright’s views kept him out of Palmerston’s Liberal cabinet in 1859, and Palmerston wanted to offer him a Privy Councilorship as some recompense. The Queen would not hear of it. She wrote to Palmerston: “It would be impossible to allege any service Mr. Bright has rendered, and if the honour were looked upon as a reward for his systematic attacks upon the institutions of the country, a very erroneous impression might be produced as to the feeling which the Queen or her Government entertain toward these institutions.”17 Bright himself did not believe his views were radical. In fact, he professed to think them conservative, because if put into practice they would strengthen the country by granting the mass of people their rights and so secure their loyalty. “I assure you,” he told the Tories, “that resistance is not always Conservative. I profess to be, in intention, as Conservative as you.”18

Among the ideas of the Manchester School, it was the franchise that was carried forward most successfully after 1865. Bright’s great adversary in the House was Robert Lowe, the Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer, the most notable advocate of free enterprise in the history of the House of Commons. If history conformed to any reasonable sort of presupposition, he would have been the leader of the Manchester School instead of being the leader of the opposition to its leader. Bright and Lowe did not contest each other on free enterprise. It was John Stuart Mill who engaged Lowe on the issue. Lowe said that the principles of political economy decreed certain absolute rules of policy. Mill rose and said with some anger, “I do not know in Political Economy a single practical rule that must be applicable to all cases.”19 Mill sat behind Bright in the House, and worked closely with him on the franchise.

The free-trade idea fared less well than the franchise. The businessmen themselves began to question free trade only four years after Cobden’s death. Some of them then supported the Reciprocity Association whose purpose was to increase exports by reciprocity treaties and imperial preference arrangements. In 1886, it was moved in the Chamber of Commerce “that, having waited in vain forty years for other nations to follow the Free Trade example of England, the chamber thinks the time has arrived to reconsider that position.” The motion was defeated 22 to 21. So it was that in less than half a century, Manchester economics passed from a commanding position to one which had to be held tenaciously. What remained was an impression—never clearly perceived—of what some good men had fought for and what well-meaning people still should want. When Logan Pearsall Smith was a student at Balliol in 1889, he was invited to breakfast with Jowett who had some great persons as his other guests. “Then they got to talking about Free Trade,” Smith wrote in his diary, “and most of them turned out to be Protectionists, which in England is a fad of the intellectually incompetent.” Jowett was pained. “They wagged their foolish heads, and said how hardly Time had treated the high hopes of the early Free Traders and how prosperity was immediately to arrive, and how Cobden had said that in 40 years the name of Protection would be obsolete.”20 Foolish or not, they were right, and Jowett’s distress was the wishfulness of an older generation.

Protection was more than the enthusiasm of dullards. It was a growing force, and in part was the consequence of a dissatisfaction with the policy of laisser faire with which free trade, mistakenly as it happens, was associated. The fact that the Manchester School never enunciated a coherent policy of laisser faire—the fact that laisser faire at the very most was a subordinate interest of its leaders—did not save it. The enemies of liberalism believed it had, and that was enough. The enmity showed itself in many ways. The state enlarged its power over the domestic market, and as it did it understandably wanted to control foreign trade also. Some of the critics went much further and repudiated the ethical premises of liberalism. To them the remedy was not adding another industry to the scope of the factory acts or subsidizing the output of some sort of raw materials in India. The remedy was to sweep away the premises from which the classical economists began, or were thought to have begun. Hence, Ruskin in analyzing Mill’s Principles refused to accept his definition of wealth, insisting it was not the sum of products but the quality of a people’s happiness, that what mattered was not income but what men did in order to earn it. By 1870, he was at last a force to be counted, and people came to understand what he had meant 20 years before when he turned away from art and announced he would devote himself henceforth to political economy. “He says a great many things that are worth being remembered,” Bright said of Ruskin, “and I must say—I hope he will forgive me—he says a great many things that ought to be forgotten.”21 Ruskin was a dedicated enemy of liberalism in all of its aspects, and it was he more than anyone who set it on its long decline, not excepting Carlyle and not excepting Marx. “Taken as a whole, I perceive that Manchester can produce no good art, and no good literature; it is falling off even in the quality of its cotton; it has reversed and vilified in loud lies, every essential principle of Political Economy; it is cowardly in war, predatory in peace,” he wrote in Fors Clavigera, and was in time listened to. It is strange that he should have been responsible. Yet, it was so. “To some men brought up in the traditions of the Manchester School, the dawn of a change might have come first from poetry— . . . but, above all, from Ruskin,” Alfred Hopkinson wrote.22 Why this should have been is an interesting point but beyond the net of this study. It is especially interesting because the ruling motives of the Manchester leaders were not as distant from Ruskin’s as he thought.

The decline of the school had its ironic side. By 1884, liberalism had fallen so far that Spencer, in The Man versus the State (one of the very few expositions of laisser faire ever written), was able to list several scores of laws that abridged in a fundamental way, he believed, the freedom of the individual. Among the victims of the change were some of the liberals themselves. As an instance, Spencer quoted from a work called “On the Value of Political Economy to Mankind,” in which it was declared that “the truth of Free Trade is clouded over by the laissez-faire fallacy” and that “we need a great deal more paternal government—that bugbear of the old economists.” It was written by A. N. Cumming, and it won him the Cobden Prize Essay award for 1880.

Notes

Bibliography

In order to make the bibliography more convenient to use, the works have been grouped according to four of the topics of the book. Some contain information on more than one topic, and they have been classified according to that topic on which they contain the most specialized information.

[1.]Proceedings of the Chamber of Commerce, II, 267; Annual Report of the Board of Directors of the Chamber of Commerce and Manufacturers for 1848 (Manchester [1849]), p. 16.

[2.]Proceedings of the Chamber of Commerce, IV, 645.

[3.]Speeches . . . by Richard Cobden, II, 418.

[4.] Charles C. F. Greville, A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV, King William IV, and Queen Victoria, ed. Henry Reeve (London, 1888), VIII, 107.

[5.]Journals, 1846-47, 1849 (Add. MS. 43674, British Museum), Aug. 20, 27, 1849.

[6.]Diaries, Oct., 1859-May, 1861 (Add MS. 43675, British Museum), Oct. 29, 1859; Oct. 27, Nov. 14, March 26 and 30, and May 4, 1860.

[7.]Speeches . . . by John Bright, p. 125.

[8.]Idem; Marx and Engels, Correspondence, p. 147.

[9.]Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 171, p. 1831.

[10.]The Public Letters of . . . John Bright, p. 238.

[11.]The Manchester Examiner and Times, Jan. 31, 1865.

[12.]The Manchester Guardian, Feb. 1, 1861.

[13.]The Manchester Examiner and Times, Jan. 27, 1863, and Jan. 26, 1864.

[14.]The Manchester Guardian, Jan. 31, 1862.

[15.]Speeches . . . by John Bright, p. 147.

[16.]Ibid., pp. 384, 293, 249.

[17.] Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright, p. 283.

[18.]Speeches . . . by John Bright, p. 328.

[19.] Quoted by MacGregor, Economic Thought and Policy, p. 86.

[20.]A portrait of Logan Pearsall Smith, drawn from his letters and diaries and introduced by John Russell [London, 1950], pp. 48-49.

[21.]Speeches on the Public Affairs of the last Twenty Years, 2d ed. (London, 1869), p. 7.

[22.] In the preface to Gerald Berkeley Hertz, The Manchester Politician 1750-1912 (London, 1912), p. 6.