Richard Cobden’s “I have a Dream” speech (1846)
Friday 17 February 2012
In a speech he gave in the House of Commons in January 1846 Richard Cobden (1804-1865) gave what is in effect his version of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech in which he outlined what his vision of the world would look like 1,000 years hence when “the Free-Trade principle” he advocated had become universal. Cobden sincerely believed that this would result in “the greatest revolution that ever happened in the world’s history”. </quotes/326>
I see in the Free-trade principle that which shall act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe,—drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bonds of eternal peace. I have looked even farther. I have speculated, and probably dreamt, in the dim future—ay, a thousand years hence—I have speculated on what the effect of the triumph of this principle may be. I believe that the effect will be to change the face of the world, so as to introduce a system of government entirely distinct from that which now prevails.
Economics
- Aquinas on fraudulent dealing
- Atkinson: Protection promotes War - Free Trade promotes Peace
- Bentham on Usury
- Boehm-Bawerk’s Theory of Capital
- Böhm-Bawerk, “On the Completion of Marx’s System (of Thought)” (1896, 1898)
- Böhm-Bawerk, “Zum Abschluß des Marxschen Systems” (1896)
- Cobden’s Speeches on Free Trade
- Cobden: An Appreciation I
- Cobden: An Appreciation II
- Condillac’s Economic Thought
- Coquelin on Competititon
- Coquelin on Industry
- Coquelin on Political Economy
- Demsetz and Property Rights
- Early Republican Economic Policy
- Eugen Richter and the Critique of Socialism
- Famous Economists and Political Philosophers
- Faucher on Property
- Fetter’s Economic Thought
- Friedman on “I, Pencil” & the Invisible Hand
- Friedman on Capitalism and Freedom
- Garnier on the Origin of the Term Laissez-faire
- Garnier on the Physiocrats
- Grampp on the Manchester School of Economics
- Hazlitt, The Future of Capitalism
- Heyne, Economics as a Way of Thinking
- Higgs on the Influence of the Physiocrats
- Hirst on the Manchester School
- Hutt, Reflections on the Keynsian Episode
- Ingram, History of the Early Austrian School of Economics
- Invisible Hand Explanations of Society
- Jasay, The Capitalist State
- Jevons on Richard Cantillon
- Kirzner on the Economic Point of View
- Kirzner, Entrepreneurship & the Market Approach to Development
- Lachmann and the Subjective Paradigm
- Lachmann, The Significance of the Austrian School
- Lalor’s Cyclopedia - 19thC French Political Economy
- Lalor’s Cyclopedia - Preface and Table of Contents
- Marshall on The Growth of Free Industry and Enterprise
- Martineau on Property & Slave Labour
- Martineau’s Primer on Laissez-Faire Economics
- Marx’s Works
- McCulloch on Smuggling
- McCulloch on the Balance of Trade
- McCulloch on the Corn Laws
- O'Driscoll, Spontaneous Order and Coordination
- Polanyi and Spontaneous Ordering
- Political Ideas of the Classical Economists
- Rae on the publication of the Wealth of Nations (1776)
- Richard Cobden’s “I have a Dream” speech (1846)
- Rothbard on the Prehistory of the Austrian School
- Rothbard on the Public Sector
- Say on Colonial Slave Labor
- Say on Markets
- Say on Property Rights
- Selgin on Free Banking
- Sennholz, The Chicago Monetary Tradition
- Sirc, Problems of Economic Resposibility
- Smart on Boehm-Bawerk
- Smart on Wieser’s theory of value
- The Economic and Ethical Thought of Paul Heyne
- The Manchester School of Economics by William Grampp
- Tullock and Scientific Inquiry
- Tullock, Application of Economics in Biology
- Viner on International Trade
- Walker on Public Revenue (1899)
- Walker on the Wage Fund (1899)
- Walker on Wages (1899)
- Wicksteed on the Psychology of Choice
- Yeager & Smith on Central Banking