," said he, "because they have got government contracts, fancy
that trade is good, and that war is good for trade. Why, it is but
endeavoring to keep a dog alive by feeding him with his own tail."

This homeliness of speech, when there is strong conviction and massive
sense behind it, has a prodigious effect upon a large meeting. Once,
during his warfare upon the Corn Laws, he exclaimed:--

"This is not a party question, for men of all parties are united upon
it. It is a pantry question--a knife-and-fork question--a question
between the working millions and the aristocracy."

So in addressing the work-people of his native town, who were on a
strike for higher wages at a time when it was impossible for the
employers to accede to their demands without ruin, he expressed an
obvious truth very happily in saying:--

"Neither act of parliament nor act of a multitude can keep up wages."

I need scarcely say that no combination of physical and intellectual
powers can make a truly great orator. Moral qualities are indispensable.
There must be courage, sincerity, patriotism, humanity, faith in the
future of our race.

His Quaker training was evidently the most influential fact of his whole
existence, for it gave him the key to the moral and political problems
of his day. It made him, as it were, the natural enemy of privilege and
monopoly in all their countless forms. It suffused his whole being with
the sentiment of human equality, and showed him that no class can be
degraded without lowering all other classes. He seems from the first to
have known that human brotherhood is not a mere sentiment, not a
conviction of the mind, but a fact of nature, from which there is no
escape; so that no individual can be harmed without harm being done to
the whole. When he was a young man he summed up all this class of truths
in a sentence:--

"The interests of all classes are so intimately blended that none can
suffer without injury being inflicted upon the rest, and the true
interest of each will be found to be advanced by those measures which
conduce to the prosperity of the whole."

Feeling thus, he was one of the first to join the movement for Free
Trade. When he came upon the public stage the Corn Laws, as they were
called, which sought to protect the interests of farmers and landlords
by putting high duties upon imported food, had consigned to the
poor-houses of Great Britain and Ireland more than two millions of
paupers, and re