He believes in it still, and, if it must go, he is ready to idolize its memory.

For this he gives up all his most cherished notions and all his less absorbing principles...." "Yet Mr.Bright is consistent.

He has one master passion and his breast, capacious as it is, can hold no more.

That master passion is the love of that great dominant Democracy.

He worshipped it while rising to its culminating point, and he is obliged to turn right round to worship it while setting.
He did not himself know, until tested by this great trial, how entirely his opinions as to war and peace, and slavery and freedom, and lust of conquest and hatred of oppression, were all the mere accidents which hung loosely upon him, and were capable of being detached at once in the interest of the ruling passion of his soul for that great dominant Democracy.
Nor need we wonder; for if that great Democracy has been a failure, then men will say that the life of Mr.John Bright up to this time has been but a foolish dream[1376]." Evidently Bright's speeches were causing anxiety and bitterness; but an "if" had crept into the estimate of the future of American democracy, caused less by the progress of the war than by the rising excitement of democratic England.