The Online Library of Liberty

A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.

• Preface.
• The Life of Richard Cobden
• Chapter I.: Early Life.
• Chapter II.: Commercial and Mental Progress.
• Chapter III.: Travels In West and East.
• Chapter IV.: The Two Pamphlets.
• Chapter V.: Life In Manchester, 1837–9.
• Chapter VI.: The Foundation of the League.
• Chapter VII.: The Corn Laws.
• Chapter VIII.: Cobden Enters Parliament—first Session.
• Chapter IX.: Cobden As an Agitator.
• Chapter X.: The New Corn Law.
• Chapter XI.: Sir Robert Peel’s New Policy.
• Chapter XII.: Renewed Activity of the League—cobden and Sir Robert Peel—rural Campaign.
• Chapter XIII.: The Session of 1844—factory Legislation—the Constituencies.
• Chapter XIV.: Bastiat—new Tactics—activity In Parliament—maynooth Grant—private Affairs.
• Chapter XV.: The Autumn of 1845.
• Chapter XVI.: Repeal of the Corn Laws and Fall of the Government.
• Chapter XVII.: Correspondence With Sir Robert Peel—cessation of the Work of the League.
• Chapter XVIII.: Tour Over Europe.
• Chapter XIX.: Election For the West Riding.—purchase of Dunford.—correspondence.
• Chapter XX.: Miscellaneous Correspondence On Social and Political Movements.
• Chapter XXI.: The Don Pacifico Debate—the Papal Aggression—correspondence With Mr. Bright On Reform—kossuth.
• Chapter XXII.: The Protectionists In Office.
• Chapter XXIII.: The Panic of 1853.
• Chapter XXIV.: The Crimean War.
• Chapter XXV.: Death of His Son.
• Chapter XXVI.: Chinese Affairs—cobden’s Motion—the Dissolution.
• Chapter XXVII.: The Indian Mutiny—private Affairs—second Journey to America.
• Chapter XXVIII.: Return From America.—the New Ministry.
• Chapter XXIX.: The French Treaty.
• Chapter XXX.: Holiday and Return to Paris.
• Chapter XXXI.: The Tariff—the Fortification Scheme.
• Chapter XXXII.: The Policy of the Commercial Treaty.
• Chapter XXXIII.: Miscellaneous Correspondence, 1859–60—paris—return to England.
• Chapter XXXIV.: The American War—fortification Schemes—international Law.
• Chapter XXXV.: Correspondence With Mr. Delane.
• Chapter XXXVI.: The Danish War—last Speeches In Parliament—correspondence.
• Chapter XXXVII.: Speech At Rochdale—the Land Question—correspondence—last Days and Death.
• Chapter XXXVIII.: Conclusion.
• Appendix
• Note A. (see P. 115).
• Cobden to W. C. Hunt On the Hours of Labour.
• Full Text of the Last Letter Written By Mr Cobden
• Bibliography of Richard Cobden, Based On the British Museum Catalogue
• Biography, Criticism Etc

CHAPTER VI.

the foundation of the league.

1838.
Æt. 34.The French economist who recounted to his countrymen the history of the great agitation in which Cobden now gradually rose to a foremost place, justly pointed out that the name and title of the Anti-Corn-Law League gave to foreigners a narrow and inadequate idea of its scope, its depth, and its animating spirit. What Bastiat thus said with regard to foreigners, is just as true with regard to ourselves of a later generation. We too are as apt as Frenchmen or Germans to think narrowly and inadequately of the scope and animating spirit of this celebrated confederation. Yet the interest of that astonishing record of zeal, tact, devotion, and courage, into some portions of which the biographer of Cobden has now to enter, lies principally for us in the circumstance that the abolition of the protective duties on food and the shattering of the protective system was, on one side, the beginning of our great modern struggle against class preponderance at home, and on another side, the dawn of higher ideals of civilization all over the world.

It was not of himself assuredly that Cobden was speaking, when at the moment of the agitation reaching its height, he confessed that when it first began they had not all possessed the same comprehensive view of the interests and objects involved, that came to them later. “I am afraid,” he said, “that most of us entered upon this struggle with the belief1838.
Æt. 34. that we had some distinct class-interest in the question, and that we should carry it by a manifestation of our will in this district, against the will and consent of other portions of the community.”1 There was in this nothing that is either astonishing or discreditable. The important fact was that the class-interest of the manufacturers and merchants happened to fall in with the good of the rest of the community; while the class-interest against which they were going up to do battle, was an uncompensated burden on the whole commonwealth. Besides this, it has been observed on a hundred occasions in history, that a good cause takes on in its progress larger and unforeseen elements, and these in their turn bring out the nobler feelings of the best among its soldiers. So it was here. The class-interest widened into the consciousness of a commanding national interest. In raising the question of the bread-tax, and its pestilent effects on their own trade and on the homes of their workmen, the Lancashire men were involuntarily opening the whole question of the condition of England.

The backbone of the discussion in its strictly local aspect was in the question which Cobden and his friends at this time kept incessantly asking. With a population increasing at the rate of a thousand souls a day, how can wages be kept up, unless there be constantly increasing markets found for the employment of labour; and how can foreign countries buy our manufactures, unless we take in return their corn, timber, or whatever else they are able to produce? Apart, moreover, from increase of population, is it not clear that if capitalists were free to exchange their productions for the corn of other countries, the workmen would have abundant employment at enhanced wages? A still more formidable argument even than these lay in the mouths of the petitioners. 1838.
Æt. 34.They boldly charged Parliament with fostering the rivalry of foreign competitors; and the charge could not be answered. By denying to America and to Germany the liberty of exchanging their surplus food for our manufactures, the English Legislature had actually forced America and Germany to divert their resources from the production of food, in order to satisfy their natural demand for manufactures. It was the corn laws which nursed foreign competition into full vitality.

But this strictly commercial aspect could not suffice. Moral ideas of the relations of class to class in this country, and of the relations of country to country in the civilized world, lay behind the contention of the hour, and in the course of that contention came into new light. The promptings of a commercial shrewdness were gradually enlarged into enthusiasm for a far-reaching principle, and the hard-headed man of business gradually felt himself touched with the generous glow of the patriot and the deliverer.

Cobden’s speculative mind had speedily placed the conflict in its true relation to other causes. We have already seen how ample a conception he possessed of the transformation for which English society was ripe, and how thoroughly he had accustomed himself to think of the corn laws as merely part of a great whole of abuse and obstruction. But he was now, as at all times, far too wise a man to fall into the characteristic weakness of the system-monger, by passing over the work that lay to his hand, and insisting that people should swallow his system whole. Nobody knew better how great a part of wisdom it is for a man who seeks to improve society, to be right in discerning at a given moment what is the next thing to be done, or whether there is anything to be done at all. His interest in remoter issues did not prevent him from throwing himself with all the energy of apostolic spirit upon the par ticular point at which the campaign of a century first opened.1838.
Æt. 34. As he said to his brother in a letter that has already been quoted, he had convinced himself that a moral, and even a religious, spirit might be infused into the question of the corn laws, and that if it were agitated in the same manner as the old question of slavery, the effect would be irresistible.2

Cobden was in no sense the original projector of an organized body for throwing off the burden of the corn duties. In 1836 an Anti-Corn-Law Association had been formed in London; its principal members were the parliamentary radicals, Grote, Molesworth, Joseph Hume, and Mr. Roebuck. But this group, notwithstanding their acuteness, their logical, penetration, and the soundness of their ideas, were in that, as in so many other matters, stricken with impotence. Their gifts of reasoning were admirable, but they had no gifts for popular organization, and neither their personality nor their logic offered anything to excite the imagination or interest the sentiment of the public. “The free-traders,” Lord Sydenham said, with a pang, in 1841, “have never been orators since Mr. Pitt’s early days. We hammered away with facts and figures and some arguments; but we could not elevate the subject and excite the feelings of the people.” An economic demonstration went for nothing, until it was made alive by the passion of suffering interests and the reverberations of the popular voice. Lord Melbourne, in 1838, sharply informed all petitioners for the repeal of the corn-laws, that they must look for no decided action on the part of the government, until they had made it quite clear that the majority of the nation were strongly in favour of a new policy. London, from causes that have often been explained and are well understood, is no centre for the kind of agitation which the Prime Minister, not without some secret mockery, invited 1838.
Æt. 34.the repealers to undertake. In London there is no effective unity; interests are too varied and dispersive; zeal loses its directness and edge amid the distracting play of so many miscellaneous social and intellectual elements. It was not until a body of men in Manchester were moved to take the matter in hand, that any serious attempt was made to inform and arouse the country.

The price of wheat had risen to seventy-seven shillings in the August of 1838; there was every prospect of a wet harvesting; the revenue was declining; deficit was becoming a familiar word; pauperism was increasing; and the manufacturing population of Lancashire were finding it impossible to support themselves, because the landlords, and the legislation of a generation of landlords before them, insisted on keeping the first necessity of life at an artificially high rate. Yet easy as it is now to write the explanation contained in the last few words, comparatively few men had at that time seized the truth of it. That explanation was in the stage of a vague general suspicion, rather than the definite perception of a precise cause. Men are so engaged by the homely pressure of each day as it comes, and the natural solicitudes of common life are so instant, that a bad institution or a monstrous piece of misgovernment is always endured in patience for many years after the remedy has been urged on public attention. No cure is considered with an accurate mind, until the evil has become too sharp to be borne, or its whole force and weight brought irresistibly before the world by its more ardent, penetrative, and indomitable spirits.

In October, 1838, a band of seven men met at a hotel in Manchester, and formed a new Anti-Corn-Law Association. They were speedily joined by others, including Cobden, who from this moment began to take a prominent part in all counsel and action.

That critical moment had arrived, which comes in the1838.
Æt. 34. history of every successful movement, when a section arises within the party, which refuses from that day forward either to postpone or to compromise. The feeling among the older men was to stop short in their demands at some modification of the existing duty. This was the mind of the President and most of the directors of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce. A meeting of this important body was held in December (1838). The officers of the Chamber had, only for the second time in ten years, prepared a petition to the House of Commons, but the petition spoke only of modifications, and total repeal was not whispered. The more energetic members protested against these faltering voices. Cobden struck into the debate with that finely tempered weapon of argumentative speech, which was his most singular endowment. The turbid sediment of miscellaneous discussion sank away, as he brought out a lucid proof that the corn law was the only obstacle to a vast increase of their trade, and that every shilling of the protection on corn which thus obstructed their prosperity, passed into the pockets of the land-owners, without conferring an atom of advantage on either the farmer or the labourer.

The meeting was adjourned, to the great chagrin of the President, and when the members assembled a week later, Cobden drew from his pocket a draft petition which he and his allies had prepared in the interval, and which after a discussion of many hours was adopted by an almost unanimous vote. The preamble laid all the stress on the alleged facts of foreign competition, in words which never fail to be heard in times of bad trade. It recited how the existing laws prevented the British manufacturer from exchanging the produce of his labour for the corn of other countries, and so enabled his foreign rivals to purchase 1839.
Æt. 35.their food at one half of the price at which it was sold in the English market; and finally the prayer of the petition called for the repeal of all laws relating to the importation of foreign corn and other foreign articles of subsistence, and implored the House to carry out to the fullest extent, both as affects manufactures and agriculture, the true and peaceful principles of free-trade.

In the following month, January, 1839, the Anti-Corn-Law Association showed that it was in earnest in the intention to agitate, by proceeding to raise a subscription of an effective sum of money. Cobden threw out one of those expressions which catch men’s minds in moments when they are already ripe for action. “Let us,” he said, “invest part of our property, in order to save the rest from confiscation.” Within a month six thousand pounds had been raised, the first instalment of many scores of thousands still to come. A great banquet was given to some of the parliamentary supporters of Free Trade; more money was subscribed, convictions became clearer, and purpose waxed more resolute. On the day after the banquet, at a meeting of delegates from other towns, Cobden brought forward a scheme for united action among the various associations throughout the country. This was the germ of what ultimately became the League. It is worth noticing that more than four years before this, he had in his first pamphlet sketched in a general form the outlines of the course eventually followed by the League,—so fertile was his mind in practical methods of enlightening opinion, even without the stimulation of a company of sympathetic agitators. There he had asked how it was that so little progress had been made in the study of which Adam Smith was the great luminary, and why, while there were Banksian, Linnæan, Hunterian societies, there was no Smithian society, for the purpose of disseminating a more just knowledge of the principles of trade. Such a society might enter into1839.
Æt. 35. correspondence with similar bodies abroad, and so help to amend the restrictive policy of foreign governments, while at home prizes might be offered for the best essays on the corn question, and lecturers might be sent to enlighten the agriculturalists, and to invite discussion upon a subject which, while so difficult, was yet of such paramount interest to them and to the rest of the country.3 The hour for the partial application of these very ideas had now come. Before the month of January, the Manchester Anti-Corn-Law Association was completely organized, and its programme laid before the public. The object was declared to be to obtain by all legal and constitutional means, such as the formation of local associations, the delivery of lectures, the distribution of tracts, and the presentation of petitions to parliament, the total and immediate repeal of the corn and provision laws. Cobden was appointed to be a member of the executive committee, and he continued in that office until the close of the agitation.

In the February of 1839, as Cobden gaily reminded a great audience on the eve of victory six years later, three of them in a small room at Brown’s hotel in Palace Yard were visited by a nobleman who had taken an active part in advocating a modification of the corn laws, but who could not bring himself to the point of total repeal. He asked what had brought them to town, and what it was that they wanted. They had come, they said, to seek the total and immediate repeal of the corn laws. With an emphatic shake of the head, he answered, “You will overturn the monarchy as soon as you will accomplish that.”4 For the moment it appeared as if this were really true. Mr. Villiers moved in the House of Commons (Feb. 18), that a 1839.
Æt. 35.number of petitions against the corn laws should be referred to a Committee of the whole House. The motion was negatived without a division. The next day he moved that certain members of the Manchester Association should be heard at the bar, in support of the allegations of a petition which they had presented three days before. Though this was a Whig parliament, or because it was a Whig parliament, the motion was thrown out by a majority of more than two to one in a House of more than five hundred members.

We cease to be amazed at this deliberate rejection of information from some of the weightiest men in the kingdom, at one of the most critical moments in the history of the kingdom, when we recall the fact that notwithstanding the pretended reform of parliament in 1832, four-fifths of the members of the House of Commons belonged to the old landed interests. The bewilderment of the government was shown by the fact that Lord John Russell and Lord Palmerston went into the lobby with the Protectionists, while the President of the Board of Trade followed Mr. Villiers. Yet Lord John had declared a short time before, that he admitted the duties on corn as then levied to be untenable. The whole incident is one of the most striking illustrations on record of one of the worst characteristics of parliamentary government, its sluggishness in facing questions on their merits. In this instance, the majority found before long that behind the industrial facts which they were too selfish and indolent to desire to hear, were political forces which they and their leader together were powerless to resist.

A few days later (March 12) Mr. Villiers brought forward his annual motion, that the house should resolve itself into committee to take into consideration the act regulating the importation of foreign corn. Across Palace Yard were assembled delegates from the thirty-six principal towns in the kingdom, to enforce a prayer that had been urged by1839.
Æt. 35. half a million of petitioners. But the motion, after a debate which extended over five nights, received only one hundred and ninety-seven votes out of a House of five hundred and forty-one. The delegates returned to their homes with the conviction that they had still a prolonged struggle before them. In the picturesque phrase of a contemporary writer, their departure was like the break-up of a Mahratta camp; it did not mean that the war was over, but only that attack would be renewed from another quarter. Some of them were inclined to despond, but the greater part almost instantly came round to the energetic mind of Cobden. He recalled the delegates to the fact that in spite of the House over the way, they represented three millions of the people. He compared the alliance of the great towns of England to the League of the Hanse Towns of Germany. That League had turned the castles which crowned the rocks along the Rhine, the Danube, and the Elbe into dismantled memorials of the past, and the new league would not fail in dismantling the legislative stronghold of the new feudal oppressors in England. No time was lost in strengthening their organization by drawing isolated societies to an effective centre. Measures were speedily taken (March) for the formation of a permanent union, to be called the Anti-Corn-Law League, to be composed of all the towns and districts that were represented in the delegation, and of as many others as might be induced to form local associations and federate them with the League. The executive committee of the old Manchester Anti-Corn-Law Association was transformed into the council of the new Anti-Corn-Law League. With the same view of securing unity of action, the central offices were established in Manchester, whence from this time forward the national movement was directed.

The impatience of the free-traders had been irritated, 1839.
Æt. 35.rather than soothed, by a speech of two hours in length from the great leader of the Conservative opposition, in which he carefully abstained from committing himself to any opinion on the principle at issue. He devised elaborate trains of hypothetical reasoning; he demolished imaginary cases; he dwelt on the irreconcilable contradictions among the best economists. But there was not a single sentence in the whole of Sir Robert Peel’s speech, that could be taken to tie his hands in dealing with the corn laws, while on the contrary there was one sentence which to any one who should have accustomed himself to study the workings of that strong but furtive intellect, might have revealed that the great organ and chief of the landowners was not far removed from the Manchester manufacturer. He had at least placed himself in the mental attitude which made him accessible to their arguments. “I have no hesitation in saying,”—so Sir Robert Peel told the house—“that unless the existence of the corn law can be shown to be consistent, not only with the prosperity of agriculture and the maintenance of the landlord’s interest, but also with the protection and the maintenance of the general interests of the country, and especially with the improvement of the condition of the labouring class, the corn law is practically at an end.”5

Although such a position was rational and political, as compared with the talk of those who could not get beyond the argument that the proprietors of the soil had a right to do as they pleased with their own, still there remained a long road to travel before Peel could be regarded as a probable auxiliary. The repealers felt that they must depend upon their own efforts, without reference either to Sir Robert or Lord John. They had started a little organ of their own in the press in April; and the Anti-Corn-Law Circular used language which was not at all too strong for the taste of most of them, when it cried out that all political1839.
Æt. 35. factions were equally dishonest and profligate; that the repealers at any rate would not suffer their great question to be made a mere official hobby-horse; that they would pursue an undeviating course of strenuous protest to the nation at large, knowing well that repeal would never be granted by either the one or the other faction of political pettifoggers by which the kingdom was alternately cursed. If they could only get the honest, simple-hearted, and intelligent portion of the people to see the justice and the necessity of their cause, then they would not be long before they dragged both sections of the state quacks at their chariot wheels, each striving to outbid the other in tenders of service and offers of concession.6

In less violent tones, Cobden kept insisting on the same point, after the rebuffs of the year had shown them that the battle would be long, and that its issues went too deep into the social system to suit the aims of traditional parties, for the traditional parties in England were of their very essence superficial and personal. Towards the end of 1839, Dr. Bowring came to Manchester to report on what he had found on the subject of trade with England during a recent official visit to the countries of the German Customs Union. His points were that in consequence of the English obstruction to the import of grain and timber, capital in Germany was being diverted to manufacturers; that the German agriculturists were naturally eager for the removal of the protective duties on manufactures, which they could purchase more cheaply from England; but that they were met by the argument that England would never reciprocate by opening a free market for return purchases of grain, as her landlords and agriculturists were far too mighty to be overthrown or even shaken. Cobden, with his usual high 1839.
Æt. 35.confidence of spirit, replied to this by asking how every social change and every religious change had been accomplished otherwise than by an appeal to public opinion. How, he exclaimed, had they secured the penny postage, which happened to have come into force on the very day of the meeting? Not by sitting still and quietly wishing for it, but by a number of men stepping out, spending their money, giving their time, agitating the community. And in the same way, how could they think that the corn laws would be repealed by sitting still at home, and lamenting over their evils? He appealed to them, not as Whigs, Tories, or Radicals, but as men with a sense not more of commercial interest, than of unmistakable national duty.

We have to remember that at this date the admission of Catholics to Parliament was not so remote, that men had forgotten the means by which that triumph of justice and tolerance had been achieved. Catholic emancipation was only ten years old, and it was present to the mind of every politician who wanted to have anything done, that this great measure had been carried by the incessant activity of O’Connell and the Catholic Association. That was a memorable example that the prejudice of the governing classes was to be most effectually overcome by the agitation of a powerful outside confederacy. No two men were ever much more unlike than Cobden and O’Connell, but Cobden had been a subscriber to the great agitator’s Rent, and we may be sure that the Irish example was not lost on the leaders of the association against the corn laws. In truth here was the vital change that had been finally effected in our system by the Reform Act. Schemes of political improvement were henceforth to spring up outside of Parliament, instead of in the creative mind of the parliamentary leader; and official statesmanship has ever since consisted less in working out principles, than in measuring the force and direction of the popular gale. It is thus the non-official1839.
Æt. 35. statesman who, by concentrating the currents of common sentiment or opinion, really shapes the policy which the officials chiefs accept from his hands.

The first year’s campaign convinced the repealers that agitation is not always such smooth work as it had been in Ireland. They learnt how hardly an old class interest dies. They had begun the work of propagandism by sending out a small band, which afterwards became a large one, of economic missionaries. In Scotland the new gospel found a temperate hearing and much acceptance, but in England the lecturers were not many days in discovering at what peril they had undertaken to assault the prejudice and selfishness of a territorial aristocracy, and the brutality or cowardice of their hangers-on. Though there were many districts where nobody interfered with them, there were many others where neither law nor equity gave them protection. At Arundel the mayor refused the use of the town hall, on the ground that the lecture would make the labourers discontented; and the landlord refused the use of his large room, on the ground that if he granted it, he should lose his customers. A landowning farmer went further, and offered a bushel of wheat to anybody who would throw the lecturer into the river. At Petersfield, a paltry little borough in Hampshire, almost in sight of Cobden’s birthplace, either spite or the timidity of political bondage went so far, that when the lecturer returned, after his harangue in the market-place, to the Dolphin, Boar, or Lion, where he had taken his tea and ordered his bed, the landlord and landlady peremptorily desired him to leave their house. In the eastern counties, again, they were usually well received by the common people, but vexed and harassed by the authorities. At Louth they were allowed to deliver their address in the town hall one night, but as the lecturer had the fortune 1839.
Æt. 35.to discomfit a local magnate in the discussion which followed, the permission which had been given to use the hall on the next night was arbitrarily withdrawn, and the lecturers were driven to say what they had come to say from a gig in the market-place. Nor was this the end of the adventure. As they were about to leave the town, they were served with a warrant for causing an obstruction in a thoroughfare; they were brought before the very magnate over whom they had won so fatal a victory, and by him punished with a fine. At Stamford they were warned that the mob would tear them to pieces; but they protected themselves with a body-guard, and the mob was discovered to be less hostile than a small band of people who ought to have deserved the name of respectable. At Huntingdon the town clerk was the leader in provoking an outrageous disturbance, which forced the lecturer to give up the ground. In the Duke of Newcastle’s country, at Newark and at Retford, there was not an innkeeper who dared to let the lecturer a room; and at Worksop, not only could the lecturer not find a room, nor a printer who should dare to print a placard, but he was assaulted by hired bullies in the street. It was reserved for a seat of learning to show that no brutality can equal that which is engendered of the union of the violent inherited prejudice of the educated classes, with the high spirits of youth. No creature is a more unbridled ruffian than the ruffian undergraduate can be, and at Cambridge the peaceful arguments of the lecturer were interrupted by a destructive and sanguinary riot. The local newspaper afterwards piously congratulated the furious gownsmen on having done their duty as “the friends of good government, and the upholders of the religious institutions of the country.”7

It is only when people want to get something done that all the odd perversities of the human mind spread themselves1839.
Æt. 35. out in panoramic fulness. A long campaign of reckless and virulent calumny was at once opened in the party organs. One London newspaper described the worst members of the Association as unprincipled schemers, and the best as self-conceited socialists. Another declared with authority that it was composed in equal parts of commercial swindlers and political swindlers. A third with edifying unction denounced their sentiments as subversive of all moral right and order, their organization as a disloyal faction, and their speakers as revolutionary emissaries, whom all peaceable and well-disposed persons ought to assist the authorities in peremptorily putting down. The Morning Post, the journal of London idleness, hailed the Manchester workers in a style that would have been grotesque enough, if only it had not represented the serious thought of many of the most important people in the dominant class. “The manufacturing people exclaim, ‘Why should we not be permitted to exchange the produce of our industry for the greatest quantity of food which that industry will anywhere command?’ To which we answer, why not, indeed? Who hinders you? Take your manufactures away with you by all means, and exchange them anywhere you will from Tobolsk to Timbuctoo. If nothing will serve you but to eat foreign corn, away with you, you and your goods, and let us never see you more!” This was a quarter from which the language of simpletons was to be expected, but as the repealers had a thousand opportunities of discovering within the next seven years, the language of simpletons has many dialects. One of the lowest perversions of the right sense of place and proportion in things, was reached by those who cried out angrily that the great and decisive test for candidates at the next general election would not be corn laws or anti-corn-laws, but “How are your views on the Sabbath question?” The 1839.
Æt. 35.Chartists, of whom we shall say something in another chapter, began a long course of violent hostility by trying at the very outset of the agitation to break up a meeting at Leeds, insisting that the movement was a cheat put on the work-people of the country by cunning and rapacious employers. Even in places where so much strong political intelligence existed as at Birmingham, members of the town council of the borough were found to talk about “the interested movements of the Whig corn law intriguers,” and to urge that the discussion of the corn laws was merely a Whig device to embarrass the patriotic champions of parliamentary reform.8 Of all this the Leaguers heard much more, and from more troublesome people, in the years to come.

Meanwhile the information which their lecturers brought back to head-quarters at Manchester, as to the state of some of the rural districts, inspired the leaders of the agitation with new zeal, and a stronger conviction of the importance of their cause. In Devonshire they found that the wages of the labourers were from seven to nine shillings a week; that they seldom saw meat or tasted milk; and that their chief food was a compost of ground barley and potatoes. It was little wonder that in a county where such was the condition of labour, the lecturer was privately asked by poor men at the roadside if he could tell them where the fighting was to be. Nor need we doubt that he was speaking the simple truth when he reported that, though ignorant of Chartism as a political question, the great mass of the population of Devon were just as ready for pikes and pistols, as the most excitable people of the factory towns. In Somersetshire the budget of a labourer, his wife, and five children under ten years of age, was as follows. Half a bushel of wheat cost four shillings; for grinding, banking, and barm, sixpence; firing, sixpence; rent, eighteen pence; leaving, out of the total1839.
Æt. 35. earnings of seven shillings, a balance of sixpence, out of which to provide the family with clothing, potatoes, and all the other necessaries and luxuries of human existence.

With facts like these before them, the leaguers read with mockery the idyllic fustian in which even the ablest men of the landlord party complacently indulged their feeling for the picturesque. Sir James Graham, in resisting Mr. Villiers’s motion this year, spoke of the breezy call of incense-breathing morn, the neat thatched cottage, the blooming garden, the cheerful village green. The repeal of the corn laws would lead to a great migration from all this loveliness to the noisy alley, and the “sad sound of the factory bell.” “Tell not to me any more,” the orator called out in a foolish ecstasy, “of the cruelties of the conveyance of the Poles to the wintry wastes of Siberia; talk not to me of the transportation of the Hill Coolies from Coromandel to the Mauritius; a change is contemplating by some members of this House, far more cruel, far more heart-rending in the bosom of our native land.”9 If this nonsense was the vein of so able a man as Graham, we may infer the depths of prejudice and fallacy down into which Cobden and his allies had to follow less sensible people. And the struggle had hardly begun. The landlords were not yet awakened into consciousness that this time the Manchester men were in earnest, and resolutely intended to raise the country upon them. They still believed that the corn laws were as safe as the monarchy; and many months passed before they realized that the little group who now met several times in each week in a dingy room on an upper floor at Newall’s Buildings in Market Street in Manchester, were not to be daunted either by bad divisions in Parliament, 1839.
Æt. 35.or bad language in the newspapers, because they had become fired by the conviction that what they were fighting against was not merely a fiscal blunder, but a national iniquity.

Cobden lived at this time, along with his brothers and sisters, in a large house in Quay Street, which he had bought very shortly after settling in Manchester, and which was known to the next generation as Owens College. His business was in a flourishing condition, and it would have saved him from many a day of misery if he could have been content to leave it as it was. It was from no selfish or personal motive that he now proceeded to make a change in the arrangements. The reader has already seen how at the beginning of his career Cobden affectionately insisted with his brother, “that you will henceforth consider yourself as by right my associate in all the favours of fortune.” And it was in the interest of Frederick Cobden and his two younger brothers that he now broke up the existing partnership. The firm had previously consisted of five members, carrying on business under three titles, one at the warehouse in Watling Street in London; the second at the print works at Sabden; the third, specifically known as Richard Cobden and Company, at Manchester and Crosse Hall, near Chorley in Lancashire. Frederick Cobden was not a member of any of these allied firms, and there seems to have been no willingness to make room for him. At the end of July, 1839, Cobden withdrew from his old partners. He left them to carry on the London warehouse and the Sabden print works on their own account. He then proceeded himself to form a new partnership with Frederick Cobden, to carry on the Manchester warehouse and the print works at Crosse Hall. This was the arrangement of Cobden’s business during the six years of agitation against the Corn Laws.

Though his motive in making the change was the desire1839.
Æt. 35. to raise the position of his elder brother at once, and to pave the way for his younger brother in the future, yet Cobden had no doubt convinced himself that the change was sound and prudent in itself. A less sanguine man would have found the altered conditions formidable. In the business which he left, though he did not find himself in entire sympathy with one of the London partners, all had been managed with the greatest exactitude, and there had been abundance of capital in proportion to the extent of the business. At Crosse Hall he found himself much less favourably placed. He was thrown entirely on his own unaided resources, for his letters show that Frederick Cobden, with all his excellent qualities, yet was one of the men who mistake feverish anxiety for business-like caution, and then suppose that they repair the errors of timidity by moments of hurried action. Instead of coming into a factory, like the works at Sabden, perfectly organized and superintended by an experienced eye, Cobden had now to find a new staff, and what was perhaps at least as arduous, he had to find new capital, and to earn interest as well as profit from its working.

He had, moreover, so early as 1835 made speculative purchases of land in various quarters of Manchester, where his too cheerful vision discovered a measureless demand for houses, shops, and factories, as soon as ever the corn duty should be repealed, and the springs of industrial enterprise set free. For five and twenty years waste spaces between Victoria Park and Rusholme, in Quay Street, and Oxford Street, bore melancholy testimony to a miscalculation; and for five and twenty years Cobden paid a thousand pounds a year, in the shape of chief rent, for a property which thus brought him not a shilling of return. In spite of the grave drawbacks which I have named, it is not doubted by those who have the best means of knowing, that the new 1840.
Æt. 36.firm was for some time reasonably successful, and was even visited by gleams of genuine prosperity. But the undertaking was hardly launched, before its chief was drawn away from effective interest in it by a strong vocation which he could not resist, to be the leader of the great national cause of the time.

Meanwhile within a few months of the re-settlement of his business, he took another momentous step in marrying (may, 1840). His wife was Miss Catherine Anne Williams, a young Welsh lady, whose acquaintance he had made as a school-friend of one of his sisters. She is said by all who knew her to have been endowed with singular personal beauty, and with manners of perfect dignity and charm Whether in Cobden’s case this union was preceded by much deliberation, we do not know; perhaps experience shows that the profoundest deliberation in choosing a wife is little better than the cleverness of people who boast of a scientific secret of winning in a lottery. Although marriage is usually so much the most important element in deciding whether a life shall be heaven or hell, it is that on which in any given instance it is least proper for a stranger to speak.

It would seem that to be the wife of a prominent public man is not always an easy lot. As Goethe’s Leonora says of men and women:—

• Ihr strebt nach fernen Gütern,
• Und euer Streben muss gewaltsam seyn.
• Ihr wagt es, für die Ewigkeit su handelu,
• Wenn wir ein einzing nah beschränktes Gut
• Auf dieser Erde nur besitzen möchten,
• Und wünschen dass es uns beständig bliebe.1

If the champion of great causes has to endure the loss of domestic companionship, he is at least compensated by patriotic satisfaction in the result; but unless the woman be1840.
Æt. 36. of more than common strength of public zeal, the thousand lonely days and nights and all the swarm of undivided household cares may well put temper and spirits to a sharp strain. In the last year of Cobden’s life, as he and Mrs. Cobden were coming up to London from their home in the country, Mrs. Cobden said to him,—“I sometimes think that, after all the good work that you have done, and in spite of fame and great position, it would have been better for us both if, after you and I married, we had gone to settle in the backwoods of Canada.” And Cobden could only say, after looking for a moment or two with a gaze of mournful preoccupation through the window of the carriage, that he was not sure that what she said was not too true. But in 1840 evil days had not yet come, and as they took their summer wedding trip through France, Savoy, Switzerland, and Germany, Cobden had as good right as any mortal can ever have, to look forward to a future of material prosperity, domestic happiness, and honest service to his country.

[1]Speech at Manchester, Oct. 19, 1843.

[2]Above, p. 126.

[3]Cobden’s Political Writings, i. 82.

[4]Cobden’s Speeches, i. 845.

[5]March 18, 1839.

[6]December 10, 1839.

[7]May 14, 1839.

[8]Bunce’s History of the Corporation of Birmingham, i. 166–7.

[9]March 15, 1839.

[1]“Ye strive for far-off goals, and strenuous your battle. For immortality to toil, do you aspire. But we one single narrow good, and that nigh to us, would fain possess upon this earth, and only ask that it should steadfast dwell.”