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THE LIFE OF

JOHN BRIGHT

BY

GEORGE MACAULAY TREVELYAN

LATE FELLOW OF TRINITY COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

ILLUSTRATED

FOURTH IMPRESSION

LONDON

CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD

1913

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AUTHOR'S PREFACE

THE pleasure of writing a biography is dependent on three things: the sympathy of the biographer for his subject; the interest of the new material which he has to handle; and his relations to those who have honoured him by trusting to him the memory they revere. In all three respects I have been most fortunate, and wish to express my gratitude to the family and relations of John Bright, who have smoothed the path for me by forbearance, by encouragement, and by much active help.

To the very many persons who have sent letters of John Bright, or contributed other documents or information, either to Mr. John Albert Bright in former years, or more recently to myself, I offer the most sincere thanks in his name and in my own. They are too numerous for me to make acknowledgments separately to all. But documents printed in the course of the volume will indicate the identity of some at least of these benefactors.

My debt to the author of the Lives of Cobden and of Gladstone may be traced on half the pages of this volume.

If in some places I seem to speak with a personal intimacy of events that occurred ten years before I was born, the reader may bear in mind that my father entered the House of Commons in 1865-the last General Election held under the auspices of Palmerston. That was the great Parliament which, after Palmerston's death, rejected the more limited Reform Bill of the year 1866 and passed the larger measure of 1867. My father, from his first entrance into the House of Commons, saw much of Mr. Bright, who treated him with the free kindness of a great man to a young friend and admirer. It is to this source that I owe many reminiscences of those days, too recent as yet to have been completely overtaken by the slow foot of history, but already too far away for the recollections of most of our political veterans.

CHELSEA, April 1913.

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