Messrs. Bright and Cobden made two remarkable speeches at Rochdale
on Tuesday. Mr. Cobden, who spoke first, disposed completely of the tariff excuse for the American war. He found, when he travelled in America, in 1859, no interest at all taken in his own subject. Every one was absorbed with the impending slavery contest, and even to him, the representative free-trader, no conadences of differences on this head were made. Everything was swallowed up in the slavery contest, and no one with a fraction of honesty could deny that thereon, and thereon alone, the war broke out. Mr. Bright made a rather less discursive speech, dilating on the Whig desertion of Reform, the need of Re- form, and the first uses that the working claw would put it to. He regretfully patronized Lord Russell as one who, though a noble, had in him instincts tending to freedom which official interests only induced him to postpone. On the Tories he frowned more severely than usual. His speech, bitter and gloomy in its tone, flashed occasionally into gleams of pathos and splendour which almost bring to mind the rare sunlight on a sombre Northern moor ; but it ended in a Fent to the "instructed democracy" of the Northern States, into which it is not possible for many Englishmen to follow him. His gleams of passionate eloquence light up wonderfully the monotony of his gloomy anger, but they fail to throw a charm over the uniform dead level of his big fetish "instructed democracy."
