duced two millions more to the verge of despair. John
Bright was the great orator of the movement for the repeal of those
laws. After six years of the best sustained agitation ever witnessed in
a free country, the farmers and land-owners were not yet convinced. In
1846, however, an event occurred which gave the reasoning of Cobden and
the eloquence of Bright their due effect upon the minds of the ruling
class. This event was the Irish famine of 1846, which lessened the
population of Ireland by two millions in one year. This awful event
prevailed, though it would not have prevailed unless the exertions of
Cobden and Bright had familiarized the minds of men with the true
remedy,--which was the free admission of those commodities for the want
of which people were dying.

On his seventieth birthday Mr. Bright justified what he called the
policy of 1846. He said to his townsmen:--

"I was looking the other day at one of our wages books of 1840 and 1841.
I find that the throttle-piecers were then receiving eight shillings a
week, and they were working twelve hours a day. I find that now the same
class of hands are receiving thirteen shillings a week at ten hours a
day--exactly double. At that time we had a blacksmith, whom I used to
like to see strike the sparks out. His wages were twenty-two shillings a
week. Our blacksmiths now have wages of thirty-four shillings, and they
only work ten hours."

Poor men alone know what these figures mean. They know what an amount of
improvement in the lot of the industrial class is due to the shortened
day, the cheaper loaf, the added shillings.

In a word, the effort of John Bright's life has been to apply Quaker
principles to the government of his country. He has called upon
ministers to cease meddling with the affairs of people on the other side
of the globe, to let Turkey alone, to stop building insensate ironclads,
and to devote their main strength to the improvement and elevation of
their own people. He says to them in substance: You may have an
historical monarchy and a splendid throne; you may have an ancient
nobility, living in spacious mansions on vast estates; you may have a
church hiding with its pomp and magnificence a religion of humility; and
yet, with all this, if the mass of the people are ignorant and degraded,
the whole fabric is rotten, and is doomed at last to sink into ruin.

THOMAS EDWARD,

COBBLER AND NATURALIST.

The strangest story told for a long