"Going into the House last night, the caution lately given me by a poor but honest Scotchman struck me. He said to me, "Mr. Bright, I'll give you a piece of advice. You are going into bad company; and now that you are in, remember that you stick to what you said when you were out." If one had dropped from the clouds upon the floor of the House and listened to the debate last night, I never should have dreamed that there was the least distress or discontent in the country. It was true that Lord John Russell made a very clever speech and some hard hits at the ministry...Then came Lord Palmerston, and he made a very clever speech, if there was no country; it would have been very well at a debating club; it had some hard cuts at the ministry, interspersed with references to Afghanistan and the Ameers of Scinde, and everything but the condition of England question."
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Speech at an Anti-Corn Law League banquet (29 July 1843), quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (1913), pp. 116-117
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Bright
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John Bright
John Bright (November 16, 1811 – March 27, 1889) was a British Radical and Liberal statesman, one of the greatest orators of his generation and a promoter of free trade policies.
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