“The mass of candidates put forward their intention to give a general support 
to Lord Palmerston, as their best claim to be returned as representatives of public 
opinion in the new Parliament. ...Palmerston will enter the House, not as the head 
of a Conservative, or a Whig, or a Peelite, ~ or a Radical party, but as the leader 
of the English people, and as the great designer and administrator of a national 

party.”? 

Such are the words of The Morning Post, Lord Palmerston’s 
private organ. Palmerston as dictator, the new Parliament as his 
corps législatif*?’’—such is their meaning, which the electoral 
bulletins seem to warrant. As to the “public opinion” spoken of by 
The Post, it has been justly said that Palmerston manufactures one 
half of it, and laughs at the other half. 

The complete rout of the Manchester School**—Bright and 
Milner Gibson being unseated at Manchester, Cobden at Hudders- 
field, Sir E. Armitage at Salford, Fox at Oldham and Miall at 
Rochdale—is the great event of the electoral battle. The issue of 
the Manchester election particularly took every one by surprise, 
even the Palmerston Government. How little stress it had laid 
upon the chances of victory in that quarter may be inferred from 
its unsettled and hesitating conduct. First, on the receipt of some 
‘Manchester addresses, Palmerston threatened to proceed himself 
to Cottonopolis, hurling defiance at his antagonists on “their own 
dunghill.” On second thought, however, he shrank back. Then 
Bob Lowe, the Ministerial understrapper, came forward. Invited 
by a coterie of great mill lords to stand for Manchester, and 
receiving pledges that, if defeated, a sum of £2,000 should be 

4 The Morning Post, No. 25971, March 27, 1857, leading article.— Ed. 

handed to him, which might enable him to buy one of the county 
rotten boroughs,*” he publicly accepted the offer, and allowed an 
electioneering committee to set out canvassing in his name. Then 
came Mr. Cobden’s great Manchester speech.**°° Palmerston now 
bid Lowe retract, which he did. On further reflection still, the 
Manchester attempt appeared so destitute of all elements of 
success that The Times was ordered to play the part of the fox in 
the fable.” Bob Lowe had to write a leader insisting upon the 
re-election of Bright & Co., and warning Manchester not to 
disgr ace itself by the repudiation of its old representatives. When, 
in spite of all these misgivings, the electric wire flashed to 
Downing street the news of Cobden’s defeat, of Bright’s and 
Gibson’s rejection, and by overwhelming majorities, too, judge of 
the rapturous delight and the maddening cries of triumph in the 
Ministerial camp. As to Palmerston himself, he thought perhaps 
that he had been too successful for his own purposes—keenly 
aware, as the old trickster is, that to paralyze even a giant, you 
have only to get him into the House of Commons, while. to hasten 
the breaking down of that House itself —of its basis, the privileged 
constituencies, and its superstructure, Ministerial usurpation — you 
have only to turn out its eminent members and throw them on the 
street, thus giving chiefs of note to the disinherited multitude 
outside the gates of the “British Constitution.” 

The defeat of the Manchester School in their own strongholds, 
by the bulk of their own army, bears all the appearances of a 
personal triumph on the part of Palmerston, not only because 
Cobden and Gibson-moved the vote of censure, which was to drive 
him from the Cabinet, and which afforded the pretext for the 
dissolution of Parliament. A deadly antagonism of principles and 
situations seems to resume itself in the persons of Palmerston on 
the one side, of Bright, Cobden & Co., on the other. Palmerston, 
the trumpet of national glory, they, the organs of industrial 
interests; the diplomatic Viscount concentrating in his person all 
the usurpations of the British oligarchy, the parvenu demagogues 
representing all the vitality of the British middle classes; he 
deriving his strength from the decay of parties, they owing their 
force to the struggle of classes—the last unscrupulous incarnation 
of old Toryism against the chiefs of the new defunct Anti-Corn- 
Law League.*”’ Thus the defeat of Cobden, Bright & Co. appears 

The Times, No. 22633, March 20, 1857.— Ed. 

as a personal triumph of Palmerston, the more their victorious 
opponents on the hustings can claim no importance of their own. 
Sir John Potter, for instance, the opponent of Bright, is only 
known as the fattest man of Manchester. He would go under the 
name of the Manchester Sir John Falstaff, if his small wit and his 
long purse did not protect him from being compared to that 
immortal knight. A. Turner, Milner Gibson’s opponent, rested his 
personal claims on the fact of his being a commonplace man who 
would never hurt the feelings of his fellow-citizens by unpleasant: 
pretensions to genius or brilliancy. Mr. Akroyd, finally, the 
opponent of Cobden, accused the latter of being an imperial man, 
while he (Akroyd) had never been anything, and would certainly 
never be anything beyond a plain Huddersfield man. All of them 
gloried in being not men of talent but of character, which latter 
gift was sure to preclude them from falling, like their predeces- 
sors, into the fault of “opposing all Governments,” and of 
sacrificing, like Milner Gibson, lucrative offices to theoretical 
crotchets. | 
Yet, in spite of appearances, the appeal of Palmerston against 
Cobden and Co.* afforded, not the cause, but only the pretext for 
the explosion of combustible materials which, for a long time, 
were gathering round the precincts of the Manchester School. 
Manchester forming the nucleus of the party, and Bright being 
acknowledged as its.true hero, it will suffice to consider his defeat 
to account for the simultaneous failure of his companions in arms 
at other manufacturing places. There were, first, the old Whigs | 
and Tories of Manchester, eager to revenge themselves for their 
political nullity since the days of the Anti-Corn-Law League. The 
elections of 1852, when Bright carried it over them by a majority 
of 100 votes only, had already shown their numerical force to be 
by no means contemptible. Unable, as they certainly were, to 
vanquish under their own banners, they formed a_ powerful 
contingent for any seceding corps of the Bright army. Then, in 
second line, came the leaders of the high-priced press, with their 
inveterate rancor and lurid malignity against the parliamentary 
godfathers of the penny press.*’* Mr. Garnett, the editor of The 
Manchester Guardian, stirred heaven and earth against Bright, and 
proved indefatigable in clothing in more or less decent garbs the 
shabby motives of the anti-Bright coalition—an attempt facilitated 
by the unpopularity Bright and Cobden had incurred at the time 

March 27, 1857.— Ed. 

of the Russian war.*” At that period they could, indeed, not 
venture upon fronting a public meeting at Manchester, but had to 
hide themselves in select tea-parties at Newall’s buildings, the old 
abode of the Anti-Corn-Law League. Of the liberal bourgeoisie, 
the mill lords and the large commercial firms, an overwhelming 
majority voted against Bright; of the petty middle class and the 
shopocracy, that numerous minority only which everywhere in the 
United Kingdom sticks to the heels of its “natural superiors,” 
Quakers and Irishmen, stood like one man for Bright. Whence 
this secession of the liberal bourgeoisie? To a great extent it is 
explained by the impatience of the rich “men of Manchester” to 
become “gentlemen,” like their rivals at Liverpool. If they had 
borne with the superiority of a man of genius like Bright so long 
as he was the indispensable tool of their class-interests, they now 
thought the opportunity ripe for indulging the envious ostracism 
of well-to-do mediocrities. However, they rebelled not only against 
his personal superiority, but still more against the superannuated 
pretensions of the Anti-Corn-Law League rump, which weighed 
upon Manchester somewhat as the Rump Parliament*'! did upon 
the Commonwealth of England; periodically assembling under the 
presidency of Mr. Wilson, that “venerable fixture” and a retired 
starch merchant by profession, supported on the platform by 
Mr. Robinson, the honorary Secretary of the League, and other 
men without social standing or personal eminence, whom the 
billows of a tempest-beaten period had thrown on the surface, who 
obstinately refused to subside, and could, indeed, show no cause . 
for their protracted appearance on the political stage, but the 
worn-out tradition of the past, and the conventional he of the 
present, of playing Manchester whenever Bright wanted to call it 
up. One of the leaders of the rebellion, Mr. Entwistle, declared 
roundly on the hustings: 

“It is not the question of the Chinese war, or of the Russian war, or of any war 
at all. The question is, whether Manchester shall any longer submit to the dictation 
of the remnant of the party that assembles at Newall’s buildings.” 

In finally burying the incubus of the Anti-Corn-Law League 
rump, the Manchester mill lords, while flattering themselves that 
they were closing the doors of their Jacobin club, were, of course, 
not aware that they were sweeping away the main obstruction to a 
new revolutionary movement. 

The rationale, however, of the Manchester election was betrayed 
by a drunken anti-Bright man, who, during the polling, kept on 
crying vociferously: “We won’t have home policy; we want foreign 

policy.” In other words: Away with reform questions and class 
struggles! After all, the middle classes form the majority of 
electors, and that is all we want. The cry against the aristocracy 
has become tiresome, unprofitable, and is only stirring up the 
working men. We have got free trade, and feel marvelously at our 
ease, especially since the reduction of the war income tax. We 
dearly love a lord for all that. “We won’t have home policy; we 
want foreign policy.” Let all of us unite on that ground where we 
are all equals, on the national ground. Let us all be Englishmen, 
true John Bulls, under the leadership of the truly British Minister, 
Lord Palmerston.*” 

The true secret, then, of the Manchester election is, the 
abdication on the part of the mill lords of the revolutionary 
leadership they had usurped during the Anti-Corn-Law League 
agitation. 

Written on March 31, 1857 Reproduced from the newspaper 
Tribune, No. 4990, April 17, 1857