nt and Bright against it. On only one other occasion--a vote
for South Kensington--did they go into opposite lobbies, during twenty-five
years of parliamentary life. In the autumn of 1845 Bright retained Cobden
in the public career to which Cobden had invited him four years before.
Bright was in Scotland when a letter came from Cobden announcing his
determination, forced on him by business difficulties, to retire from
public work. Bright replied that if Cobden retired the mainspring of the
League was gone. "I can in no degree take your place," he wrote. "As a
second I can fight, but there are incapacities about me, of which I am
fully conscious, which prevent my being more than second in such a work as
we have laboured in." A few days later he set off for Manchester, posting
in that wettest of autumns through "the rain that rained away the Corn
Laws," and on his arrival got his friends together, and raised the money
which tided Cobden over the emergency. The crisis of the struggle had come.
Peel's budget in 1845 was a first step towards Free Trade. The bad harvest
and the potato disease drove him to the repeal of the Corn Laws, and at a
meeting in Manchester on 2nd July 1846 Cobden moved and Bright seconded a
motion dissolving the league. A library of twelve hundred volumes was
presented to Bright as a memorial of the struggle.

Bright married, in June 1847, Miss Margaret Elizabeth Leatham, of
Wakefield, by whom he had seven children, Mr John Albert Bright being the
eldest. In the succeeding July he was elected for Manchester, with Mr
Milner Gibson, without a contest. In the new parliament, as in the previous
session, he opposed legislation restricting the hours of labour, and, as a
Nonconformist, spoke against clerical control of national education. In
1848 he voted for Hume's household suffrage motion, and introduced a bill
for the repeal of the Game Laws. When Lord John Russell brought forward his
Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, Bright opposed it as "a little, paltry,
miserable measure," and foretold its failure. In this parliament he spoke
much on Irish questions. In a speech in favour of the government bill for a
rate in aid in 1849, he won loud cheers from both sides, and was
complimented by Disraeli for having sustained the reputation of that
assembly. From this time forward he had the ear of the House, and took
effective part in the debates. He spoke against capital punishment, against
church-rates, against flogging i