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 IX.

cobden as an agitator.

In the autumn of 1841 there happened what proved to be a1841.
Æt. 37. signal even in the annals of the League, and in Cobden’s personal history. He and Mr. Bright made that solemn compact which gave so strong an impulse to the movement, and was the beginning of an affectionate and noble friendship that lasted without a cloud or a jar until Cobden’s death.

Mr. Bright, who was seven years younger than Cobden, had made his acquaintance some time before the question of the Corn Laws had come up. He had gone over in the year 1836 or 1837 to Manchester, to call upon Cobden, “to ask him if he would be kind enough to come to Rochdale, and to speak at an education meeting which was about to be held in the schoolroom of the Baptist chapel in West Street of that town. I found him in his office in Mosley Street. I introduced myself to him. I told him what I wanted. His countenance lit up with pleasure to find that there were others that were working in this question, and he without hesitation agreed to come. He came, and he spoke; and though he was then so young as a speaker, yet the qualities of his speech were such as remained with him so long as he was able to speak at all—clearness, logic, a conversational eloquence, a persuasiveness which, when conjoined with the 1841.
Æt. 37.absolute truth which there was in his eye and in his countenance—a persuasiveness which it was almost impossible to resist.”

Then came the gradual formation of the League, Cobden’s election to Parliament, and the close of his first session. “It was in September, in the year 1841,” said Mr. Bright. “The sufferings throughout the country were fearful; and you who live now, but were not of age to observe what was passing in the country then, can have no idea of the state of your country in that year..... At that time I was at Leamington, and I was, on the day when Mr. Cobden called upon me—for he happened to be there at the time on a visit to some relatives—I was in the depths of grief, I might almost say of despair; for the light and sunshine of my house had been extinguished. All that was left on earth of my young wife, except the memory of a sainted life and of a too brief happiness, was lying still and cold in the chamber above us. Mr. Cobden called upon me as his friend, and addressed me, as you might suppose, with words of condolence.1 After a time he looked up and said, ‘There are thousands of houses in England at this moment where wives, mothers, and children are dying of hunger. Now,’ he said, ‘when the first paroxysm of your grief is past, I would advise you to come with me, and we will never rest till the Corn Law is repealed.’ I accepted his invitation. I knew that the description he had given of the homes of thousands was not an exaggerated description. I felt in my conscience that there was a work which somebody must do, and therefore I accepted his invitation, and from that time we never ceased to labour hard on behalf of the resolution which we had made.”

“For seven years,” Mr. Bright says, “the discussion on that one question—whether it was good for a man to1841.
Æt. 37. have half a loaf or a whole loaf—for seven years the discussion was maintained, I will not say with doubtful result, for the result was never doubtful, and never could be in such a cause; but for five years or more [1841–6] we devoted ourselves without stint; every working hour almost was given up to the discussion and to the movement in connexion with this question.”2

This is an appropriate place for considering some of the qualifications that Cobden brought to the mission which he and his ally thus imposed upon themselves. In speaking of him I may seem to ignore fellow-workers whose share in the agitation was hardly less important than his own; without whose zeal, disinterestedness, and intelligence, the work of himself and Mr. Bright would have been of little effect, and could never have been undertaken. No history of the League could be perfect which did not commemorate the names and labours of many other able men, who devoted themselves with hardly inferior energy to the exhausting work of organization and propagandism. But these pages have no pretensions to tell the whole story; they only are concerned with so much of it as relates to one of its heroes. “We were not even the first,” said Mr. Bright, “though afterwards, perhaps, we became the foremost before the public. But there were others before us.” The public imagination was struck by the figures of the pair who had given themselves up to a great public cause. The alliance between them far more than doubled the power that either could have exerted without the other. The picture of two plain men leaving their homes and their business, and going 1841.
Æt. 37.over the length and breadth of the land to convert the nation, had about it something apostolic: it presented something so far removed from the stereotyped ways of political activity, that this circumstance alone, apart from the object for which they were pleading, touched and affected people, and gave a certain dramatic interest to the long pilgrimages of the two men who had only become orators because they had something to say, which they were intent on bringing their hearers to believe, and which happened to be true, wise, and just.

The agitator has not been a very common personage in English history. The greatest that has ever been seen was O’Connell, and I do not know of any other, until the time of the League, who may be placed even as second to him. In the previous century Wilkes had made a great figure, and Wilkes was a man of real power and energy. But he was rather the symbol of a strong popular sentiment, than its inspirer; and he may be more truly said to have been borne on the crest of the movement, than to have given to it force or volume.

Cobden seemed to have few of the endowments of an agitator, as that character is ordinarily thought of. He had no striking physical gifts of the histrionic kind. He had one physical quality which must be ranked first among the secondary endowments of great workers. Later in life he said, “If I had not had the faculty of sleeping like a dead fish, in five minutes after the most exciting mental effort, and with certainty of having oblivion for six consecutive hours, I should not have been alive now.” In his early days, he was slight in frame and build. He afterwards grew nearer to portliness. He had a large and powerful head, and the indescribable charm of a candid eye. His features were not of a commanding type; but they were illuminated and made attractive by the brightness of intelligence, of sympathy, and of earnestness. About the mouth there was a curiously winning mobility and play. His voice was clear,1841.
Æt. 37. varied in its tones, sweet, and penetrating; but it had scarcely the compass, or the depth, or the many resources that have usually been found in orators who have drawn great multitudes of men to listen to them. Of nervous fire, indeed, he had abundance, though it was not the fire which flames up in the radiant colours of a strong imagination. It was rather the glow of a thoroughly convinced reason, of intellectual ingenuity, of argumentative keenness. It came from transparent honesty, thoroughly clear ideas, and a very definite purpose. These were exactly the qualities that Cobden’s share in the work demanded. Any professor could have supplied a demonstration of the economic fallacy of monopoly. Fox, the Unitarian minister, was better able to stir men’s spirits by pictures, which were none the less true for being very florid, of the social miseries that came of monopoly. In Cobden the fervour and the logic were mixed, and his fervour was seen to have its source in the strength of his logical confidence.

It has often been pointed out how the two great spokesmen of the League were the complements of one another; how their gifts differed, so that one exactly covered the ground which the other was predisposed to leave comparatively untouched. The differences between them, it is true, were not so many as the points of resemblance. If in Mr. Bright there was a deeper austerity, in both there was the same homeliness of allusion, and the same graphic plainness. Both avoided the stilted abstractions of rhetoric, and neither was ever afraid of the vulgarity of details. In Cobden as in Bright, we feel that there was nothing personal or small, and that what they cared for so vehemently were great causes. There was a resolute standing aloof from the small things of party, which would be almost arrogant, if the whole texture of what they had to say were less 1841.
Æt. 37.thoroughly penetrated with political morality and with humanity. Then there came the points of difference. Mr. Bright had all the resources of passion alive within his breast. He was carried along by vehement political anger, and, deeper than that, there glowed a wrath as stern as that of an ancient prophet. To cling to a mischievous error seemed to him to savour of moral depravity and corruption of heart. What he saw was the selfishness of the aristocracy and the landlords, and he was too deeply moved by hatred of this, to care to deal very patiently with the bad reasoning which their own self-interest inclined his adversaries to mistake for good. His invective was not the expression of mere irritation, but a profound and menacing passion. Hence he dominated his audiences from a height, while his companion rather drew them along after him as friends and equals. Cobden was by no means incapable of passion, of violent feeling, or of vehement expression. His fighting qualities were in their own way as formidable as Mr. Bright’s; and he had a way of dropping his jaw and throwing back his head, when he took off the gloves for an encounter in good earnest, which was not less alarming to his opponents than the more sombre style of his colleague. Still, it was not passion to which we must look for the secret of his oratorical success. I have asked many scores of those who knew him, Conservatives as well as Liberals, what this secret was, and in no single case did my interlocutor fail to begin, and in nearly every case he ended as he had begun, with the word persuasiveness. Cobden made his way to men’s hearts by the union which they saw in him of simplicity, earnestness, and conviction, with a singular facility of exposition. This facility consisted in a remarkable power of apt and homely illustration, and a curious ingenuity in framing the argument that happened to be wanted. Besides his skill in thus hitting on the right argument, Cobden had the oratorical art of presenting it in1841.
Æt. 37. the way that made its admission to the understanding of a listener easy and undenied. He always seemed to have made exactly the right degree of allowance for the difficulty with which men follow a speech, as compared with the ease of following the same argument on a printed page which they may con and ponder until their apprehension is complete. Then men were attracted by his mental alacrity, by the instant readiness with which he turned round to grapple with a new objection. Prompt and confident, he was never at a loss, and he never hesitated. This is what Mr. Disraeli meant when he spoke of Cobden’s “sauciness.” It had an excellent effect, because everybody knew that it sprang, not from levity or presumption, but from a free mastery of his subject.

If in one sense the Corn Laws did not seem a promising theme for a popular agitation, they were excellently fitted to bring out Cobden’s peculiar strength, for they dealt with firm matter and demonstrable inferences, and this was the region where Cobden’s powers naturally exercised themselves. In such an appeal to sentiment and popular passion as the contemporary agitation of O’Connell for Repeal, he could have played no leading part.3 Where knowledge and logic were the proper instruments, Cobden was a master.

Enormous masses of material for the case poured every week into the offices of the League. All the day long Cobden was talking with men who had something to tell him. Correspondents from every quarter of the land plied him with information. Yet he was never overwhelmed by the volume of the stream. He was incessantly on the alert for a useful fact, a telling illustration, a new fallacy to expose. So dexterously did he move through the ever-growing piles 1841.
Æt. 37.of matter, that it seemed to his companions as if nothing opposite ever escaped him, and nothing irrelevant ever detained him.

A political or religious agitator must not be afraid of incessant repetition. Repetition in his most effective instrument. The fastidiousness which is proper to literature, and which makes a man dread to say the same thing twice, is in the field of propagandism were impotency. This is one reason why even the greatest agitators in causes which have shaken the world, are often among the least interesting men in history. Cobden had moral and social gifts which invest him with a peculiar attraction, and will long make his memory interesting as that of a versatile nature; but he was never afraid of the agitator’s art of repeating his formula, his principles, his illustrations, his phrases, with untiring reiteration.

Though he abounded in matter, Cobden can hardly be described as copious. He is neat and pointed, nor is his argument ever left unclenched; but he permits himself no large excursions. What he was thinking of was the matter immediately in hand, the audience before his eyes, the point that would tell best then and there, and would be most likely to remain in men’s recollections. For such purposes copiousness is ill-fitted; that is for the stately leisure of the pulpit. Cobden’s task was to leave in his hearer’s mind a compact answer to each current fallacy, and to scotch or kill as many protectionist sophisms as possible within the given time. What is remarkable, is that while he kept close to the matter and substance of his case, and resorted comparatively little to sarcasm, humour, invective, pathos, or the other elements that are catalogued in manuals of rhetoric, yet no speaker was ever further removed from prosiness, or came into more real and sympathetic contact with his audience. His speaking was thoroughly businesslike, and yet it was never dull. It was not, according to the old definition of oratory, reason fused1841.
Æt. 37. in passion, but reason fused by the warmth of personal geniality. No one has ever reached Cobden’s pitch of success as a platform speaker, with a style that seldom went beyond the vigorous and animated conversation of a bright and companionable spirit.

After all, it is not tropes and perorations that make the popular speaker; it is the whole impression of his personality. We who only read them, can discern certain admirable qualities in Cobden’s speeches; aptness in choosing topics, lucidity in presenting them, buoyant confidence in pressing them home. But those who listened to them felt much more than all this. They were delighted by mingled vivacity and ease, by directness, by spontaneousness and reality, by the charm, so effective and so uncommon between a speaker and his audience, of personal friendliness and undisguised cordiality. Let me give an illustration of this. Cobden once had an interview with Rowland Hill, some time in 1838, and gave evidence in favour of the proposed reform in the postage. Rowland Hill, in writing to him afterwards, excuses himself for troubling Cobden with his private affairs:“Your conversation, evidence, and letters, have created a feeling in my mind so like that which one entertains towards an old friend, that I am apt to forget that I have met you but once.” It was just the same with bodies of men as it was with individuals. No public speaker was ever so rapid and so successful in establishing genial relations of respect without formality, and intimacy without familiarity. One great source of this, in Mr. Bright’s words, was “the absolute truth that shone in his eye and in his countenance.”

I have spoken of Cobden’s patience in acquiring and shaping matter. This was surpassed by his inexhaustible patience in dealing with the mental infirmities of those 1841.
Æt. 37.whom it was his business to persuade. He was wholly free from the unmeasured anger against human stupidity, which is itself one of the most provoking forms of that stupidity. Cobden was not without the faculty of intellectual contempt, and he had the gift of irony; but in the contempt was no presumption, and it was irony without truculence. There came a time when he found that he could do nothing with men; when he could hardly even hope to find an audience that would suffer him to speak. But during the work of the League, at any rate, he had none of that bias against his own countrymen to which the reformer in every nation is so liable, because upon the reformer their defects press very closely and obstructively, while he has no reason to observe the same or worse defects in other nations.

It has often been said that Cobden was a good Englishman, and he was so, in spite of finer qualities which our neighbours are not willing to allow to us. London society, and smart journalists who mistook a little book-knowledge for culture, were in the habit of disparaging Cobden as a common manufacturer, without an idea in his head beyond buying in the cheapest market and selling in the dearest. This was not the way in which he struck the most fastidious, critical, and refined man of letters in Europe, accustomed to mix with the most important personages of literature and affairs then alive. Prosper Mérimée saw a great deal of Cobden in 1860, when they both spent part of the winter at Cannes. “Cobden,” he wrote to his intimate correspondent, “is a man of an extremely interesting mind; quite the opposite of an Englishman in this respect, that you never hear him talk commonplaces, and that he has few prejudices.” It was just because he was not a man of prejudice, that he had none against his own countrymen. We saw how when he was travelling in America, he found his British blood up, as he said, and be dealt faithfully with the disparagers of the mother country.41841.
Æt. 37. Returning from France on one occasion, Cobden says in his journal, that they all remarked on the handsome women who were seen on the English platforms, and all agreed that they were handsomer than those whom they had left on the other side. “The race of men and women in the British Islands,” Cobden goes on to himself, “is the finest in the world in a physical sense; and although they have many moral defects and some repulsive qualities, yet on the whole I think the English are the most outspoken, truthful men in the world, and this virtue lies at the bottom of their political and commercial greatness.”

This conviction inspired him with a peculiar respect for his great popular audiences, and they instinctively felt the presence of it, making a claim to their good-will and their attention. Cobden differed from his countrymen, as to what it is that will make England great, but he was as anxious that England should be great, and as proud of English virtues and energies, as the noisiest patriot in a London music hall.

Cobden always said that it was an advantage to him as an agitator that he was a member of the Church of England. He used to tell of men who came up to him and declared that their confidence in him dated from the moment when they learnt that he was a churchman. It was, perhaps, a greater advantage to him than he knew. However little we may admire a State establishment of religion, it is certain that where such an establishment happens to exist, those who have been brought up in it, and have tranquilly conformed to its usages, escape one source of a certain mental asperity and the spirit of division. This is no credit to them or to the institution; any more than the asperity is a discredit to those who do not conform to the institution. Nay, one 1841.
Æt. 37.strong reason why some disapprove of systems of ecclesiastical privilege, is exactly that in modern societies it necessarily engenders this spirit of division. But in itself the spirit of division is no element of strength, but rather of weakness, for one whose task is to touch doubtful or unwilling hearers.

Temperament, however, had a larger share than institutions in Cobden’s faculty of moral sympathy. There is scanty evidence of anything like an intense spirituality in his nature; he was neither oppressed nor elevated by the mysteries, the aspirations, the remorse, the hope, that constitute religion. So far as we can have means of knowing, he was not of those who live much in the Unseen. But for moral goodness, in whatever association he came upon it, he had a reverence that came from his heart of hearts. While leaning strongly towards those scientific theories of motive and conduct, of which, as has been already said, George Combe was in those days the most active propagandist, he felt no contempt, provided only their practical endeavour was towards good, for those who clung narrowly to older explanations of the heart of man. In a letter written to Combe himself, when the struggle against the Corn Laws was over, Cobden allows himself to talk freely on his own attitude in these high matters:—

...“With reference,” he says, “to your remarks as to the evangelical dissenters and religionists generally, and their views of your philosophy of morals—I will confess to you that I am not inclined to quarrel with that class of my countrymen. I see the full force of what you urge, but am inclined to hope more from them in time than any other party in the State. Gradually and imperceptibly to themselves they are catching the spirit of the age, so far as to recognize the moral laws as a part of our natural organization. They do not accept your views to the superseding of their own, but, like geology, your science is forcing its way alongside1841.
Æt. 37. of preconceived ideas, and they will for a time go together without perceptibly clashing.

“I do not quarrel with the religionists, for I find them generally enforcing or at all events recognizing and professing to act upon (they do not, I admit, sufficiently preach it) the morality of the New Testament, and you can do no more. The only difference is that John Calvin and George Combe act upon different theories, and rely upon different motives, and start from very different premises, but they recognize the self-same ends secularly speaking, and I cannot quarrel with either...I am by nature a religionist. I was much struck with your remark when you mapped my head eleven years ago,—‘Why, if you had been born in the middle ages, you would have made a good monk, you have so much veneration!’ That was a triumph for phrenology, for you could have formed no such notion from anything you had seen or heard of me. I have a strong religious feeling,—a sympathy for men who act under that impulse; I reverence it as the great leverage which has moved mankind to powerful action. I acknowledge that it has been perverted to infinite mischief. I confess it has been the means of degrading men to brutish purposes...but it has also done glorious deeds for liberty and human exaltation, and it is destined to do still better things. It is fortunate for me that whilst possessing a strong logical faculty, which keeps me in the path of rationalism, I have the religious sympathy which enables me to co-operate with men of exclusively religious sentiment. I mean it is fortunate for my powers of usefulness in this my day and generation. To this circumstance I am greatly indebted for the success of the great Free-Trade struggle, which has been more indebted to the organ of veneration for its success, than is generally known.

“I am not without hopes that the same fortunate circum stance1841.
Æt. 37. in organization may enable me to co-operate efficiently with the most active and best spirits of our day, in the work of moral and intellectual EDUCATION. I could insist upon the necessity of secular teaching and training without wounding the religious prejudices of any man, excepting the grovelling bigots whether of the High Church party or the opposite extreme, against whom I could make war in the same spirit which has in the case of the Corn monopolists enabled me to deprive them of the pretence for personal resentment, even in the hour of their defeat and humiliation.

“I have said that I have a strong feeling of sympathy for the religious sentiment. But I sympathize with all moral men who are not passive moralists: with them it is difficult to sympathize, but I venerate and trust them. Especially do I sympathize with those who labour and make sacrifices for the diffusion of sound moral principles. I will own, however, that it is unpleasant to my feelings to associate with those who, whilst they indulge in coarse sceptical allusions to our faith, do not in their private life manifest that they impose a better restraint upon themselves than is to be found in the New Testament. My active public life has sometimes thrown me into such company, and with these esprits forts, as the French call them, I have no sympathy. My maxim is in such predicaments to avoid theological discussions (here again is my veneration over-riding causality), and to avow that I am resolved to follow Bonaparte’s advice—to adhere to the religion of my mother, who was an energetically pious women.”5

No whisper was ever seriously raised against Cobden’s transparent honesty. What is worth remarking is that his sincerity was not of that cheap and reckless kind, by virtue of which men sometimes in one wild outburst of plain speech cut themselves off from chances of public usefulness for the remainder of their lives. He laid down certain1841.
Æt. 37. social ends, which he thought desirable, and which he believed that he could promote. And when one of these was fixed in his mind, and set definitely before him, he became the most circumspect of creatures. Being a man of action, and not a speculative teacher, he took care not to devote his energies to causes in which he did not see a good chance of making some effective mark, either on legislation or on important sections of public opinion. “I am cautious to a fault,” he once wrote, “and nothing will be done by me that has not the wisdom of the serpent, as much as the harmlessness of the dove in it.”6

This was only another way of saying that strong enthusiasm in him was no hindrance to strong sense. Instead of increasing the elements of friction—the besetting weakness of reformers and dissidents of all kinds—he took infinite trouble to reduce these elements to the lowest possible point. Hence he was careful not to take up too many subjects at once, because the antagonism generated by each would have been made worse by the antagonism belonging to every other, and he would have called up a whole host of enemies together, instead of leaving himself free to deal with one at a time. A correspondent once wrote to him on this point.

“You have opened a very important question,” Cobden replied, “in respect to the duty of a public man to advocate all the changes to which he may be favourable. I have often reflected upon this. Bacon says, if you have a handful of truths, open but one finger at a time. He is not the safest moral guide, I admit, but I am not sure that he is not to some extent right in this view. If we are to declare our convictions upon all subjects, and if abstract reason is to be our guide, without reference to time and circumstance, why should not I, for instance, avow myself a republican? A 1841.
Æt. 37.republic is undeniably the most rational form of government for free men. But I doubt whether I should enhance my power of usefulness by advocating that form of government for England. But whilst I do not think I should act wisely by putting forth all I think, in a practical way I so far admit the principle that I would not advocate the opposite of what I am convinced is the truth abstractedly. And this brings me to my old ground of trying to do one thing at a time. By this I mean merely that I have an aptitude for certain questions. Other people have a talent for others, and I think a division of labour is necessary for success in political, as in industrial life.”7

This wise economy brought its reward. Cobden did not carry the world with him in his own lifetime, but what he did by his method was to bring certain principles of human progress into line with the actual politics of the day. He did not create a majority, but he achieved the first difficult step of creating a strong minority, and this not merely of sympathizers in the closet, but of active followers in the nation.

It was what he called his wisdom of the serpent that gave Cobden his power in the other arts of a successful agitator, which are less conspicuous but hardly less indispensable, than commanding or persuasive oratory. He applied the same qualities in the actual business of the League which he brought to bear in his speeches. He was indefatigable in his industry, fertile in ingenious devices for bringing the objects of the League before the country, constantly on the alert for surprising a hostile post, never losing a chance of turning a foe or a neutral into a friend, and never allowing his interest about the end for which he was working, to confuse his vigilant concentration upon the means. The danger of great confederacies like the League is that they become mechanical. Machinery must of necessity play a1841.
Æt. 37. large part. Circulars, conferences, subscriptions, advertisements, deputations, eternal movings and secondings—all these things are apt to bury the vital part of a movement under a dreary and depressing fussiness, that makes one sometimes wonder whether the best means of saving an institution might not be to establish a society for overthrowing it. A society of this kind seems often a short way for choking the most earnest spirits with dusty catch-words, that are incessantly being ground out by the treadmill of agitation. It was Cobden’s fresh and sanguine temper that bore him triumphantly through this peril, though none of the energetic men with whom he worked was more busily intent on every detail of their organization. He had none of that fastidiousness which is repelled by the vulgarities of a proselytizing machine. He was like a general with a true genius for war. The strategy was a delight to him; in tactics he was one of the most adroit of men; he looked to everything; he showed the boldness, the vigilance, the tenacity, the resource, of a great commander. Above all, he had the commander’s gift of encouraging and stimulating others. He had enthusiasm, patience, and good humour, which is the most valuable of all qualities in a campaign. There was as little bitterness in his nature as in any human being that ever lived: so little that he was able to say, at the end of seven years of as energetic an agitation as could be carried on, short of physical force, that he believed he had not made a single enemy, nor wounded a single man’s personal feelings.

Critics usually singled out Cobden’s logical faculty as his strongest trait, and it was so; but he was naturally inclined to think of the conclusions of his logic in poetized forms. He always delighted, in spite of the wretched simile with 1841.
Æt. 37.which they close, in the lines in which Cowper anticipated the high economic doctrine:—

• Again—the band of commerce was design’d,
• To associate all the branches of mankind,
• And if a boundless plenty be the robe,
• Trade is the golden Girdle of the globe.
• Wise to promote whatever end he means,
• God opens fruitful Nature’s various scenes,
• Each climate needs what other climes produce,
• And offers something to the general use;
• No land but listens to the common call,
• And in return receives supply from all.
• This genial intercourse and mutual aid
• Cheers what were else an universal shade,
• Calls Nature from her ivy-mantled den,
• And softens human rock-work into men.

From Cowper, too, he was never weary of quoting the lines about liberty:—

• ’Tis liberty alone that gives the flower
• Of fleeting life its lustre and perfume,
• And we are weeds without it. All constraint
• Except what wisdom lays on evil men
• Is evil.

It was this association of solid doctrine with genial enthusiasm and high ideals, that distinguished Cobden from too many preachers of what our humourist has called the gospel according to McCrowdy. It was this kindly imaginativeness in him which caught men’s hearts. His ideals were constantly sneered at as low, material, common, unworthy, especially by the class whose lives are one long course of indolence, dilettanteism, and sensuality. George Combe tells how one evening in 1852 he was in the drawing-room of some great lady, who, amid the applause of her friends, denounced Cobden’s policy as never rising beyond a mere “bagman’s millennium.”8 This was the clever way, among the selfish and insolent, of saying that the ideal which Cobden cherished was comfort for the mass, not1841.
Æt. 37. luxury for the few. He knew much better than they, that material comfort is, as little as luxury, the highest satisfaction of men’s highest capacities; but he could well afford to scorn the demand for fine ideals of life on the lips of a class who were starving the workers of the country in order to save their own rents.

There is one more point on which it is worth while to say a word in connexion with Cobden’s character as an agitator. The great danger of the career is that it may in time lessen a man’s moral self-possession. Effect becomes the decisive consideration instead of truth; a good meeting grows into a final object in life; the end of existence is a paradise of loud and prolonged cheering; and character is gradually destroyed by the parasites of self-consciousness and vanity. On one occasion, in 1845, as we shall see, Cobden was betrayed, excusably enough, into some strong language about Sir Robert Peel. Miss Martineau, George Combe, and others, rebuked him rather sharply. He took the rebuke with perfect temper and humility, and in seeking to excuse himself, he described his feelings about public life in words of which it is impossible to doubt the exact truth. “You must not judge me,” he said, “by what I say at these tumultuous public meetings. I constantly regret the necessity of violating good taste and kind feeling in my public harangues. I say advisedly necessity, for I defy anybody to keep the ear of the public for seven years upon one question, without studying to amuse as well as instruct. People do not attend public meetings to be taught, but to be excited, flattered, and pleased. If they are simply lectured, they may sit out the lesson for once, but they will not come again; and as I have required them again and again, I have been obliged to amuse them, not by standing on my head or eating fire, but by kindred feats of jugglery, 1841.
Æt. 37.such as appeals to their self-esteem, their combativeness, or their humour. You know how easily in touching these feelings one degenerates into flattery, vindictiveness, and grossness. I really sometimes wonder how I have escaped so well as I have done. By nature I am not a mob orator. It is an effort for me to speak in public. The applause of a meeting has no charm for me. When I address an audience, it is from a sense of duty and utility, from precisely the motive which impels me to write an article in the League newspaper, and with as little thought of personal éclat. Do not, therefore, be alarmed with the idea that my head will be turned with applause. It would be a relief to me if I knew there was no necessity for my ever appearing again at a public meeting.”9

[1]Mr. Bright lost his wife on the 10th of September, and Cobden’s visit to him was on the 18th.

[2]This and the preceding passages are from the very beautiful address delivered by Mr. Bright, when he unveiled the statue of his friend at Bradford, July 25, 1877. The address is to be found in Mr. Thorold Rogers’s volume of Public Addresses of John Bright, pp. 354–366.

[3]See Mr. McCarthy’s History of Our Own Times, i. 340, 348.

[4]Above pp. 33–4.

[5]To George Combe, Aug. 1, 1846.

[6]To S. Lucas, Jan. 27, 1862.

[7]To the Rev. Thomas Spencer, April 23, 1849.

[8]Life of George Combe, ii. 309.

[9]To George Combe, Dec. 29, 1845.