t in
a national work with which his name will ever be associated. At the
moment when Bright was prostrated with grief at his wife's death Cobden
appeared on the scene and made his historic appeal. He urged his friend
to put aside his private grief, to remember the miseries of so many
other homes, miseries due directly to the Corn Laws, to put his shoulder
to the wheel, and never to rest till they were repealed.

Cobden had been less happy than Bright in his schooling. His father's
misfortune led to his spending five years at a Yorkshire school of the
worst type, and seven more as clerk in the warehouse of an unsympathetic
uncle. Like Bright, he had early to take the lead in his own family;
also, like Bright, he had to educate himself; but he had a far harder
struggle, and the enterprise which he showed in commerce in early
manhood would have left him the possessor of a vast fortune, had he not
preferred to devote his energies to public causes. The two men were by
nature well suited to complement one another. If Cobden was the more
ingenious in explaining an argument, Bright was more forcible in
asserting a principle. If Cobden could, above all other men, convince
the intellects of his hearers, Bright could, as few other speakers,
kindle their spirits for a fray. His figure on a platform was striking.
His manly expressive face, with broad brow, straight nose, and square
chin, was essentially English in type. Though in the course of his
political career he discarded the distinctive Quaker dress, he never
discarded the Quaker simplicity. His costume was plain, his style of
speaking severe, his bearing dignified and restrained. Only when his
indignation was kindled at injustice was he swept far away from the
calmness of Quaker tradition.

The Corn Laws were a sequel to the Napoleonic wars and to the insecurity
of foreign trade which these caused. While war lasted it had inflated
prices, and brought to English growers of corn a period of extraordinary
prosperity. When peace came, to escape from a sudden fall in prices, the
landed proprietors, who formed a majority of the House of Commons, had
fixed by Act of Parliament the conditions under which corn might be
imported from abroad. This measure was to perpetuate by law, in time of
peace, the artificial conditions from which the people had unavoidably
suffered by the accident of war. The legislators paid no heed to the
growth of population, which was enormous, or to the distr