about no result. London is not a place where
popular agitation finds a fitting centre. In 1838, however, Bolton, in
Lancashire, suffered from a serious commercial crisis. Three-fifths of
its manufacturing activity became paralyzed at once. Many houses of
business were actually closed and abandoned, and thousands of workmen
were left without the means of life. Lancashire suddenly roused itself
into the resolve to agitate against the corn laws, and Manchester became
the headquarters of the movement which afterward accomplished so much.

The Anti-Corn-Law League was formed, and a Free-Trade Hall was built in
Manchester on the scene of that disturbance which was called the
"massacre of Peterloo." The leaders of the Anti-Corn-Law movement were
Richard Cobden, John Bright, and Charles Villiers. Cobden was not a
Manchester man. He was the son of a Sussex farmer. After the death of
his father he was taken by his uncle and employed in his wholesale
warehouse in the city of London. He afterward became a partner in a
Manchester cotton-factory, and sometimes travelled on the commercial
business of the establishment. He became what would then 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 controv