During the last six years, Mr. Sturge has devoted himself, with his characteristic ability, zeal, and munificence, to the promotion of general education, complete suffrage, church reform, corn-law repeal, slave-trade extermination, universal peace, and cognate reforms.
On the summoning of a new Parliament, in 1847, he reluctantly consented to contest Leeds. In the course of his speech at the hustings, his proposer, the venerable Edward Baines, who had long represented the town, said: "I have to propose for your choice, as one of your representatives in Parliament, my friend and your friend, the friend of his country and of the human race, Joseph Sturge. With his principles you are well acquainted. They are the principles of liberty, of humanity, of economy, of equal rights, of freedom of trade and of thought, of voluntary education, of universal peace, and of justice to all mankind, of whatever color and of whatever clime. There are in Parliament an abundance of merchants, of manufacturers, of bankers, of lawyers, of soldiers, of sailors, of ecclesiastical patrons, of peers, and of bishops; but there is a deplorable deficiency of such men as Joseph Sturge." In his address to the electors, Mr. Sturge gave a thorough exposition of his political views, in the face of frowning Whigs and hissing Tories, both of whom brought forward candidates, and made him the object of their common hostility. After a hot contest, he was barely defeated by the concentration of a part of the Tory votes upon one of the Whig candidates; but the result was a moral triumph for Mr. Sturge and his cause.
Mr. Sturge is a member of the Society of Friends, and his beneficent life and amiable deportment are a beautiful embodiment of the principles of that sect. Till within a few years, he was extensively engaged in the corn trade, and has long been one of the most wealthy and influential citizens of Birmingham. Not satisfied with devoting liberal sums and remnants of time to philanthropic objects, he withdrew from a profitable mercantile connection, that he might consecrate all his energies to the advancement of civil and religious liberty. With no pretensions to literary or oratorical excellence, he is able to express his clear and vigorous ideas with terseness and point, both with pen and tongue. His plans, like his mind, are eminently practical; and he goes straight to the subject-matter, stripping off the husk, somewhat regardless of its texture and hue, and piercing at once to the kernel. His mercantile training has given him business habits of the first order, making him as efficient in executing plans as he is shrewd in their formation. A little apt to push aside, not to say push over, obtuseness and sluggishness, yet he mingles his unostentatious activity with such purity of intention and suavity of manner, as not to offend colder and more timid natures, while doing in a day what would occupy a month in their hands. Should he ever enter the House of Commons, he would be found, not among its brilliant, but certainly among its most useful members.