will be those who operate within the area of the London County Council. The remainder in the outside zone, "occupying 365,000 acres," will have to be dealt with. Large boroughs like West Ham will have to be considered. The river police will require special treatment. Provision will have to be made for the force required for State purposes and matters of not local concern. We are prepared to deal with all these points, and our Bill for doing so is already drawn up. There will undoubtedly, when all is done, be a boundary line round the metropolis proper, along which the police of the metropolis will march with those of the neighbouring counties. But there is that now, and the boundary line now is three times as long as it will be then, and police affairs are transacted in many places across similar boundary lines. Take the case of Lancashire: the sum of all the boundary lines dividing the county from the borough police is probably not less than that in the new London district will be. The boundary is also more intricate. Yet the matter is managed well enough in Lancashire.

And, lastly, it is simply ridiculous to represent, as Mr. Evans does in his last sentences, the proposal which we make as in any sense a return to the state of affairs before 1829. No doubt we should be narrowing the area of the metropolitan police force; the band around it would be relegated to its respective counties. But the forces concerned would be strong, unified, and responsible bodies, capable of working in harmony with one another, and no one has the slightest idea whatever of "reviving a system which has been tried and found wanting in the past."

JAMES STUART.

MR. BRIGHT.

IT

T may be too early as yet to trust ourselves to determine what rank will be permanently attributed to Mr. Bright among English statesmen. Our grief for his loss is too fresh to allow us to form a just and measured estimate of his public services. Although his illness was protracted through many months, and although early last autumn it had become certain that he would never again take an active part in public affairs, his death came upon the nation as a surprise and a shock. His place in the political life of the country was unique now that it has become vacant it cannot be filled. It is not merely an eminent statesman that has passed away: a great and original force has disappeared, which for more than forty years contributed to form the political temper and direct the political action of the people of England. But while it must be left to the next generation to pronounce a final judgment on the magnitude of the services which Mr. Bright has rendered to his country, there need be no hesitation in expressing the profound impression which his great personal qualities have made upon his contemporaries.

To those who had known Mr. Bright by his public reputation only, it was often a surprise to discover, when they met him in private, how gentle he could be in his speech and temper, and how courteous and gracious in his manners. There was nothing rugged about him, nothing coarse. Occasionally, indeed, he was brusque and peremptory in his conversation, as well as in his speeches; and, if he was provoked to political discussion, he was strenuous and sometimes stern. But he did not care to be always fighting, and when he had taken off his armour he could be as playful as a child and as charming as a woman. On the platform the volcano might have been fiercely active; an hour after he had done speaking, the mountain which had poured forth streams of angry fire was covered to the very

crater with vines and flowers. Some men in their combative moods show great strength, but in their kindly hours their strength disappears. They seem to lapse into a more gracious temper when their force is spent, and then they are positively weak. With Mr. Bright the strength was always present. It was always apparent that beneath the gentleness and the kindliness there were foundations of granite.

He had a robust conscience. He cared for plain and homely virtues. He had an intellectual and moral scorn for the subtleties of casuistry. For him the line between right and wrong was strongly and firmly marked; on one side there was light, and on the other darkness. He had no eye for the fine gradations with which to men of a different genius and culture good shades off into evil. There was a noble austerity in him. This austerity was the result, in part, of his tem- · perament, in part of the traditions and manners of that remarkable religious society into which he was born, and from which he never separated; but it was the result, I think, in part, of a noble moral austerity in his conception of God.

Although his speeches are penetrated with a religious spirit, and contain many passages which derive their dignity and splendour from the recognition of the divine and eternal order which environs the conflicts and vicissitudes, the misery and injustice of human history, it was only on rare occasions that Mr. Bright gave explicit expression in public to his deep religious faith. But there must be many still living who heard his first words spoken to a public meeting of his Birmingham constituents, and, though they were spoken thirty years ago, none who heard them can have forgotten them. He had recently recovered from a serious illness. He had been returned for Birmingham in his absence, and some time passed before he was able to meet us. The Town Hall was densely crowded. Mr. Bright had rarely spoken in Birmingham, and his constituents were eager to hear him. When he rose to speak there was immense excitement: the passionate and prolonged cheering was renewed again and again, and seemed as though it would never cease. In his first words he told us that it was nearly three years since he had been permitted -since he had been able to stand upon any public platform, and that, during that period, he had passed through a new and a great experience. From apparent health he had been brought down to a condition of weakness exceeding the weakness of a little child, in which he could neither read nor write, nor converse for more than a few minutes, without distress and without peril; and from that condition, by degrees so fine as to be imperceptible to himself, he had been restored to the comparative health in which we then beheld him. And then, after a pause, he added: "In remembrance of all this, is it wrong in me to acknowledge here, in the presence of you all, with reverent and thankful heart, the signal favour which has been ex

tended to me by the Great Supreme?" The hush which had fallen on the vast and excited assembly as soon as he began to speak deepened into awe. Most of us, I suppose, had come expecting an eloquent and vehement appeal for justice on behalf of the millions of adult Englishmen who were, at that time, excluded from the political franchise, and denied all direct and constitutional control over the legislation and policy of their country. We had expected a fierce assault on the "obstinacy" and "iniquity" of the defenders of what the orator afterwards described as "the fabric of privilege"; but the storms of political passion were for a moment stilled; we suddenly found ourselves in the presence of the Eternal, and some of us, perhaps, rebuked ourselves in the words of the patriarch, "Surely, the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not."

In private he was also reticent-perhaps too reticent, as is the manner of most devout Englishmen-on religious subjects.* But when he spoke as he did occasionally—on the great objects of faith, and on the deeper experiences of the heart, it was with a simplicity and depth of feeling which showed how large and constant a place they held in his thought and life. He used to talk of his favourite religious books; one of these was "The Jesus of the Evangelists," by Mr. Row; another was "Catholic Thoughts on the Bible," by Mr. Myers. Copies of these he was in the habit of giving to his friends. His faith, I believe, was largely due to the religious influences which surrounded him in his childhood and youth, and to those silent hours which he had spent in the Friends' Meeting House at Rochdale waiting on God. But it was greatly deepened and strengthened after he reached manhood. During one of Mr. Bright's early visits to Birmingham, he told a friend, with whom he was spending a quiet Sunday evening, that some years previously the late Benjamin Seebohm had believed himself divinely called to undertake a religious mission to the "meetings" and families of Friends in different parts of England, and that in fulfilling this duty he had visited One Ash. Mr. Seebohm is said to have been a man of great purity and simplicity of nature, of deep devoutness and unusual spiritual power. The directness, earnestness, affectionate solicitude, and spiritual wisdom of his conversation with Mr. Bright produced a profound and enduring impression. Mr. Bright was already engaged in severe and exciting political struggles; tens of thousands of his countrymen regarded him with an enthusiasm of admiration, tens of thousands with unmeasured hostility and distrust; but, through God's grace, the words of his venerable and saintly guest went home to him, and in the central depths of his life new springs were opened, which never ceased to flow. The lofty and mystic faith of the

*It is an illustration of the extent to which this reticence secularizes our public life that, in the speeches delivered in both Houses of Parliament on the occasion of Mr. Bright's death, there was no reference, as far as I have noticed, to his religious earnestness.

Society of Friends, which dispenses with priests and sacraments and all inferior aids to fellowship with God, and claims for the humblest of men the light and life of the Spirit, sometimes leads those who have received it to attribute inadequate worth to the revelation of God in the personal history and teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ. For, is not God as near to man in our time as in any time gone by? Have not we, too, direct access to the Eternal? In reporting to my friend the effect produced upon him by Mr. Seebohm's visit, Mr. Bright seems to have implied that he had not wholly escaped this danger. I had always, he said-I quote the substance of his words, their form has perished-I had always delighted in the Bible; I had delighted in its noble English,* in its magnificent poetry, and in the lofty morals of the New Testament; but I had not so fully discovered in it a divine revelation to every man on the authenticity of which I could fully rely. He then went on to speak with great clearness and force of the comfort of a firm faith in our Lord, and of the wonderful teaching contained in the four Gospels. From the time of that memorable conversation he was brought more fully under the personal power of Christ, and found rest and strength in His infinite mercy and love.†

The reverence with which it was his habit to speak of God was very impressive. It was apparent that he had known the fear-the fear in which there is no terror, and which, instead of paralyzing the soul, nerves it to the highest exertion of its moral energy and to the most courageous endurance-the fear which has filled the hearts of prophets and saints when in solitary hours they have seen the glory of God, and have learnt that already, and during this earthly life, God is always near. To him God was infinitely great and august; the will of God was one with the eternal law of righteousness-commanding obedience and submission, whatever may be the cost-not to be resisted, not to be forgotten, either by individual men or nations. except at their infinite peril. And, as I have said, the noble austerity

* On a later visit to the friend who reported this conversation to me, Mr. Bright received a handsome copy of the Revised Version. While he was writing an acknow ledgment to the giver, he looked up, and remarked, "I do not think the Revisers understood English as well as the translators of the Authorized Version, however much better they may have understood Greek."

This conversation was with Mr. Alderman White, by whom it was recently reported to me. Mr. White permits me to use it in this paper. Mr. Bright was staying at the time with Mr. Charles Sturge, and this fixes its date during the earlier years of his connection with Birmingham. The exact date of Mr. Seebohm's visit to Rochdale is uncertain; but, according to Mr. White's remembrance of Mr. Bright's account of it, it must have been some time after Mr. Bright became well known in connection with the Anti-Corn-Law League, and may even have been as late as the Crimean War. Mr. White, employing a word which I believe is much in use among the Friends, emphasized the "tenderness" with which, on that evening, he opened his heart in relation to these great topics. To many of the readers of the CONTEMPORARY, it will be unnecessary to say that Mr. Alderman White is well known, not in Birmingham alone, but all over England, for the devotion which he has shown in many good works, and especially in the movement for establishing Sunday morning schools for adults-a movement which largely owes its extraor dinary success to Mr. White's energy and zeal.