Temperance > Autobiography and personal recollections of John B. Gough

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AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JOHN B. GOUGH.
lecture, most of the party accompanying me. Mr. Bright
presided at one of the lectures. I had met him previously
at Rochdale, where he had taken the chair at a meeting
I held there. We enjoyed our visit exceedingly. Good
Friday fell on the 14th of April that year, and the day
was devoted to an excursion among the mountains, and
afterwards a dinner given to Mr. Darby’s workmen, em¬
ployed in his large furnaces. Mr. Bright spoke to them,
and I said a few words afterwards. We attended Quaker
service in the large drawing-room on Sunday, and left by
way of Southport, Liverpool, and Blackburn, to London.
While at Brymbo Hall, I asked Mr. Bright if he would
write a few lines in a commonplace-book I had with me,
in which many of my friends had written. He complied,
and wrote the following. I insert it, as I consider it well
worth preserving:—
The history of the United States is the history of a great
nation which, with a daring equal to that of the navigator who
first discovered her shores, traverses the political ocean, guided
by the wrecks of systems that have failed, and by the principles
which monarchs and statesmen have scornfully rejected. The
American Commonwealth is not a copy, it is a great original,—
it treads a path all but untrodden by every other state, and makes
discoveries which heretofore historians in their brightest pages
have not recorded. John Bright.
On a visit to Brymbo Hall, Denbighshire, ith Mo. Kith, 1854.
We reached London on Saturday, April 22, where I re¬
mained three weeks, and delivered twelve addresses, six
of them in Exeter Hall, and left on the 13th, to attend
the anniversary of the Scottish Temperance League—one
of the best organizations for the promotion of temperance
in the world. On the Sabbath previous, sermons on that
theme were preached in most of the churches. On Mon-