TOPICS OF THE DAY
RICHARD COBDEN.
LORD CANNING, Mr. James Wilson, Lord Herbert, Sir C ornewall Lewis, Lord Elgin, the Duke of Newcastle, and now Mr. Cobden,—all lost to us during the lapse of one Parliament,—do indeed, as Mr. Disraeli observed on Monday night, make a formidable gap in the roll of our most dis- tinguished statesmen. All, too, have been taken from the ranks of the Liberal party, who certainly needed no such fatal drain as this on their vitality to diminish the vivacity of their energy and the intelligence of their usefulness. The second and the last upon this list, Mr. James Wilson and Mr. Cobden, furnished to our Parliamentary life a specific kind of power and originality which will not easily find representatives to replace them,—the one the highest administrative and financial capacity, the other the most sensitive insight into the true spirit of commercial liberty, which "the pure middle class" has ever produced. In the former we lost a man of the clearest brain, the largest powers for executive work, and the completest mastery of the practical wants of English com- merce who was ever at the Treasury. In the latter we have lost the most classical, simple, and vivid thinker and speaker on economical subjects who ever emerged from the great class of English manufacturers. Some persons may smile at the epithet "classical" as applied to Mr. Cobden, but it would be difficult to find one more exactly expressive. If clearness of conception, lucidity of language, compact and orderly arrangement, vigorous illustration, strongly outlined intel- lectual conclusions, and the highest simplicity of form, do not make a classical style, it is difficult to know how to use the term. All these qualities Mr. Cobden's speeches had in a very remarkable degree, so that the spirit of commercial liberty might be said to have found almost a perfect exponent in him. The beauty of his style was no doubt heightened both by the limitation of his genius and its delicate suscepti- bility to all that it had in common with the feelings of others. The well-marked limit to his political interests and sym- pathies was no doubt favourable to his peculiar success. Mr. Cobden once told the House of Commons that he believed the science of political economy to be " the highest exercise" of which the intellect of man was capable, and " that the exact sciences require by no means so hard an effort." No doubt he was overrating with characteristic simplicity one of the least complex and least difficult departments of human thought. But it was just this—the fact that its method and its principle so absolutely possessed him,—which gave so living and cogent a force to his own expositions of it. No man can become a classic in the true sense without being thoroughly satu- rated with some principle of thought moulding his whole mind into a living unity and harmony. It would not be easy, for instance, for a statesman in the genuine sense of the term, though it would be for a political theorist, to become a classic. For, a statesman is a man who has accustomed himself to weigh conviction against conviction and party against party, to adjust the balance of conflicting interests, to refuse to let his mind develops itself according to any one vital principle of growth. And it can never be so easy for a man whose mind is the resultant of many complex forces to acquire that ease, felicity, and harmony of expression which we connect with the idea of a classic, as it is for a man whose mind is the embodiment of a single type. Hence Mr. Cobden's limitation as a statesman constituted his greatness as a repre- sentative thinker. No other man, now that he is gone, can ever give the same perfect, unique, and authoritative expression to the intellectual instincts of manufacturing energy, and the in- tellectual affinities of economic theory. While others strive to measure interest against interest, the political genius of Eng- land against its commercial genius, to gauge what is due to the nation's dignity and honour, and so arrive at a practical result, they may do as much or even more than Mr. Cobden to sway the deliberations of the Legislature; but they can never supply with anything like equal force and beauty the statement of that one element in the question, that one factor in the policy of the country,.which represents our commercial interest alone. In a great representative assembly we need perfect exponents of the more important single elements of judgment, quite as much as we need men-able to sum up and pass sentence on all the elements of the discussion. The masterly advocate of a single principle not unfrequently matures the solution of a question far more rapidly than an impartial critic of all the principles involved. One of the brightest and most im- portant constituents in the white light of political truth has been extinguished with Mr. Cobden. Mr. Cobden was a great economist—a representative of the spirit, of commercial liberty—as distinguished from a great financier. He had not sufficient intellectual indifference, sufficient control of his commercial instincts, to devote himself to the problem of how to raise a given sum of money for the use of the Government, when his most intimate conviction was that such a sum of money ought not to be needed at all. It has been said in some of the accounts of his life that only last January Mr. Gladstone offered him the post of chairman of the Board of Audit with 2,0001. a year, but that Mr. Cobden confessed he could not endure the task of auditing an expendi- ture which he believed to be unnecessary and mischievous without having any power to refuse or control it. That is a state of mind into which the colder intellectual temperament of such a man as the late Mr. James Wilson could scarcely have entered at all ; and it is a state of mind quite inconsistent with large financial capacity, which demands the power of assuming the pecuniary necessities of the Govern- ment as a fixed starting-point, without paying any regard to the theoretic mischiefs of taxation. The vivacity of Mr. Cobden's commercial instinct, his keen insight into the secret. of commercial prosperity, and his inconveniently strong reverence for the moral influence of commerce, hampered him as much as a financier, as strong non-resistance principles- would hamper a commander- in-chief in conducting a cam- paign. He could never get his mind into the attitude of con- ceding the wants of Government as reasonable ; and therefore the very axioms of financial science were almost wanting to him. The financier who wants to exact contributions from commerce must, in financial schemes, keep the economical side of his own sympathies in due subjection, and Mr. Cob- den's sympathy with the vis viva of commerce was too deep and sensitive to be kept in subjection. The very quality therefore which made him the great liberator of English trade disqualified him in great measure for English finance.
But if for this reason Mr. Cobden may be said to have been almost unpractical, or practical only as the apostle of a great theoretic truth, and to have been hampered by the sensitive scruples of genius for almost all other political purposes, it is impossible to deny that in carrying on his great campaign he showed himself a perfect master of practical persuasion, alike in addressing himself to the reason and to the interests of his adversaries. Who ever rivalled in force of pictorial argument the great passage in which during the first month of his Parliamentary career he exposed the injustice of refusing to let the working classes in England exchange their manufactures for American corn ? " Suppose," he said, "that it were but the Thames instead of the Atlantic which separated the two countries,—suppose that the people on one side were mechanics and artizans capable by their industry of producing a vast supply of manufactures, and that the people on the other side were agriculturists producing infinitely more than they could themselves consume of corn, pork, and beef,—fancy these two separate peoples anxious and willing to exchange with each other the produce of their common industry, and fancy a demon risingfrom the middle of the river—for I cannot imagine anything human in such a position and performing such an office —fancy a demon rising from the river, and holding in his hand an Act of Parliament (if you please), and saying, ' You shall not supply each others' wants ;' and then, in addition to that, let it be supposed that this demon said to his victim, with affected smiles and laughing, ' This is for your benefit ; I do this'entirely for your protection.' Where was the difference between the Thames and the Atlantic? Steam navigation had laid the great western continent of America alongside of England, and we should be setting at naught the beneficent designs of Providence by denying the one the right of benefit- ing the other. Wherever he went—whether along the banks of the Rhine or over the plains of France in search of wine —nay, even if he spoke of the luxurious Gruyere cheese of Switzerland, he found that the best of everything was brought to England, not, however, for the benefit or advantage of the poor, but to add to the enjoyments and luxuries of the rich . . . . The markets of the whole world were open to supply the luxuries of the rich, but a special law was provided to prevent the poor man from profiting by the laws of nature, and freely exchanging the produce of his labour for food. Yes, the laws of nature were set at naught when it became a question whether the people should be fed." Nor is it only in dealing with his favourite science that Mr. Cobden's logic was so pictorial and unanswerable. On a purely practical point he could push his adversaries to the wall and pin them there quite as helpless as on a question of theory. For example, when he wished to prove to the. Pro- tectionists in 1846 that they would gain no • the practical course of an appeal to the country, he delivered one of those speeches in which no one ever rivalled him. Every town, he told them, of more than 20,000 inhabitants was cer- tain—for he knew the state of the register—to give the result against them. Every borough in London, South Lancashire, West Yorkshire, North Cheshire, North Lancashire, all the large towns of England, and all the towns of Scotland would go against them. What more did they want to show how few and weak in influence their party was ? "Must you be tossed in a blanket Must you be swept out of this House into the Thames ? What must be done to convince you that the feeling of this nation is not with you ?" It is difficult to conceive logic at once more oppressive and more exasperating. No orator ever rivalled Mr. Cobden in pressing home the issue so that his opponents were held as it were in a vice. And surely no single person ever bestowed so much wealth on his country, relieved so much of its misery, or effected this from a purer and more disinterested motive, than the great man we have just lost. We may differ with him on great principles of government, but only a bigotry as nar- row and Pharisaic as The Record's could deny that in what he did, though it affected directly only the material prosperity of the country, he was in reality the servant of a far higher principle, and devoted himself to the work because he recog- nized in it a far higher aim. It is stated on high authority that when his friend Mr. Bright was suffering from one of the greatest of human afflictions, Mr. Cobden roused him out of its paralyzing influence by appealing to him for aid in the cause of the widow and the orphan, whose hopes, not only of earthly comfort, but of respectability and even virtue, were crushed by the laws which ground down the poor. His very first speech in Parliament made to mocking Protectionists, who interrupted him every five minutes with laughter, put his case expressly on this high religious ground, and appealed to the authority of 3,000 ministers of religion of every sect who had united to declare that spiritual teaching was hope- less till the physical condition of their flocks could be ame- liorated. The "noble lord (Lord Stanley)," said Mr. Cobden, "had told the House that from the moment the religious community and their pastors took up the question of slavery, from that moment the agitation must be successful. He believed this would be the case in the present instance. Englishmen had a respect for rank, for wealth, perhaps too much. They felt an attachment to the laws of their country. But there was another attribute in the minds of Englishmen, there was a permanent veneration for sacred thinge, and when their sympathy, and respect, and deference were enlisted in what they believed to be a sacred cause, you and yours' [address- ing the Opposition] will vanish like chaff before the whirl- wind." Indeed the greater half of this first speech of Mr. Cobden's in Parliament was directed to the religious ground- work of the question, and yet The Record says of Mr. Cobden, with its petty and Pharisaic spite, last Wednesday, "He was great as a political economist, and had this fallen world been the termination of man's career, he might on this narrow platform have been a great man. But death steps in and stamps the impress of littleness on every mortal achievement which is bounded by the narrow confines of the life that now is. Mr. Cobden did much to relieve the springs of industry, to promote the progress of agricultural, commercial, and manufacturing greatness; but his philanthropy dealt only with the materialism of humanity, and we know of no enter- prise, in which he took a leading part, which had for its object the rescue of his fellow-mortals from the tyranny of ignorance, immorality, and ungodliness, or their education in the knowledge of the true end of their existence. He who would run the path of true greatness must begin with glory to God in the highest, and then we may say with truth, Peace on earth, good-will to men,' "— which is, we suppose, our contemporary's amiable way of currying favour with God by damning Mr. Cobden. No truly religious man will ever attempt to anticipate the judg- ments of the unseen world, but to human eyes at least it seems clear that Mr. Cobden will always stand in English history not only as the great classic of commercial freedom, but as a man of spotless and sensitive patriotism, the friend of the friendless, the servant of the oppressed.
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