‘A Cottage with Sunflowers at Peaslake’, by English artist Helen Allingham (1848-1926). Peaslake lies about five miles east-southeast of Guildford in Surrey. For John Bright, the greatness of a country lay not in civic splendour or global influence but in securing the contentment of the humblest cottager. This emphasis on domestic felicity rather than the glories of the State was in his eyes a peculiarly Christian morality. When a Calcutta journalist urged him to remember the glories of Rome, “What is Rome now?” cried Bright. “The great city is dead. A poet has described her as ‘the lone mother of dead empires.’ Her language even is dead. [...] Yet I am asked, I, who am one of the legislators of a Christian country, to measure my policy by the policy of ancient and pagan Rome!”
I BELIEVE there is no permanent greatness to a nation except it be based upon morality. I do not care for military greatness or military renown. I care for the condition of the people among whom I live.
There is no man in England who is less likely to speak irreverently of the crown and monarchy of England than I am, but crowns, coronets,* mitres, military display, the pomp of war, wide colonies, and a huge empire are in my view all trifles, light as air and not worth considering, unless with them you can have a fair share of comfort, contentment, and happiness among the great body of the people.
Palaces, baronial castles, great halls, stately mansions, do not make a nation. The nation in every country dwells in the cottage, and unless the light of your constitution can shine there, unless the beauty of your legislation and the excellence of your statesmanship are impressed there, on the feelings and condition of the people, rely upon it, you have yet to learn the duties of government.*
* Compare Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) in Lady Clara Vere de Vere:
Trust me, Clara Vere de Vere,
From yon blue heavens above us bent,
The gardener Adam and his wife
Smile at the claims of long descent.
Howe’er it be, it seems to me,
’Tis only noble to be good.
Kind hearts are more than coronets,
And simple faith than Norman blood.
* Bright was making the same point as that made by US President John Adams (in office 1797-1801) sixty years earlier, in a speech to officers of a Massachusetts militia brigade. See A Moral and Religious People.
Précis
Victorian MP John Bright told his Birmingham constituents that he cared little for the trappings of empire and Britain’s place on the world stage. True national greatness, he said, was measured not by civic buildings or wide realms but by the contentment of the people, and any statesman who did not understand this had a poor grasp of his calling. (60 / 60 words)
