MR. COBDEN'S WEAK SIDE. not his pursuer, but himself, by
those moral secretions which a threat or a thrust provokes. His fine intelligence (which in a certain limited field, and working under tranquil and unimpassioned conditions, is almost unrivalled in its way) is rendered turbid, nay muddy, and worse than useless, by irri- tation, and his personal onslaughts are often made not only without judgment, but without sense. He loses one of his keenest powers, the perception of reason and consequent, puts forward as the case of the plaintiff what is really the only excuse for the defendant, and altogether, not unlike Mr. Winkle, when volunteering his eager and injudicious evidence for Mr. Pickwick, contrives to strengthen his opponent's case as much as ill-advised and blundering zeal can ever do. Mr. Cobden begins his savage reply to the Times by protesting with justifiable indig- nation against its representation of the Rochdale orators as advocating a confiscation of the land of the rich for the benefit of the poor,—a protest which we ourselves were the first to make. He goes on to say that the pre-eminent unscrupulous- ness of the Times, "which places it in morbid contrast with the rest of the periodical press," is mainly due to its writers' reliance "on the shield of an impenetrable secrecy," and then immediately proceeds to explain that, in the case of the Times, this reliance is peculiarly foolish, because everybody, in the political world at least, knows who is responsible for its articles. Here we find one of the most acute logicians in public life, first ascribing a peculiar and " pre-eminent " un- scrupulousness to a privilege which the Times shares with all its contemporaries, and then explaining that every other paper is far more secure in its possession of that privilege than this pre- eminent offender. In other words, Mr. Cobdenlays do wn the pre- mises which would prove all the press unscrupulous, except perhaps the Times, and then appears to congratulate himself on having shown why all the other papers are so much less unscrupu- lous than their great rival. So keen a logician as Mr. Cobden could never have written such an argument as that, if his mind had not been clouded by the fever consequent on intellectual mos- quito-bites. Even our own mild and far from uncomplimen- tary criticism appears to have rankled in that over-sensitive temperament,—if, at least, we are justified in supposing that the Roclalale Observer could scarcely have applied the epi- thet " maligning " and "scurrilous" to our very temperate remarks, without some sort of active prompting from the member for Rochdale. Nothing but the smart of personal irritation could excuse the use of adjectives so absurd to describe the words in which we expressed our fundamental but earnest difference of principle from Mr. Cobden. The same sort of intellectual hallucination which expressly attri- butes " corruption " to the aggressive arrogance of the Times might, of course, attribute to our own mild observations a "maligning and scurrilous" purport, and would with equal justice describe Mr. J. S. Mills's great work on Political Economy as a satire or a squib. It is not easy to ascribe such folly to anything but the excited imagination of an angry man. We regret this excessive tenderness, or rather soreness, in Mr. Cobden's temperament the more, because it tends to blind the new generation to his remarkable intellectual gifts. And yet it is, perhaps, only that he thus injudiciously exposes to the eye of the world the wrong side of the same fine faculty of which in so many great speeches he has shown us the right side. Mr. Cobden's intellect is not like ordinary intellects,—an effective weapon for attack or defence, which aids its owner in finding the best avenues to such conclusions as his desires and position suggest to him. It is guided by laws of its own, which refuse to be subordinate to the impulses of its owner ; but which, when subjected to these impulses, work them up into the oddest medley of hasty feeling and excited thought. Some critic has said of Dr. Adam Smith that his great power was a certain strength of imagination in conceiving all the ins and outs, the motives, the procedure, and the results of commercial transactions ;—in expanding, that is, into a clear consecutive picture the natural course and issue of men's business-dealings with each other. Mr. Cobden shows the same sort of common-sense imagination in working out, in his own mind, the actual meaning of phrases and ideas which are to others little more than abstract terms. He it was who told us that the cotton famine in Lancashire meant just what it would mean in an agricultural county to say that a fertile dis- trict was suddenly stricken with absolute sterility, so that all the labour and capital sunk in the soil refused, for that year, to yield any return. And it was he, too, who, almost in the same breath, assured us that, in spite of the greatness of this calamity, it would be better far, in a financial sense, for England to support all the idle operatives on
and also of the greater commercial calamity of war. Such matters to him are not the vague general disasters that they THE HOOGHLY IN INSURRECTION.
are to most of us,—they are painted on his imagination as a 11 Int trade of Europe with Bengal, a trade of thirty-three specific train of individual miseries, of which he grasps dis- 1 millions a year, and perhaps the most profitable of the tinctly both the force and the limits. His intellect in such many which make up the sum of our great English commerce, matters is to that of other men what an accurate barometer is in danger of an immediate, and perhaps a prolonged is to the child's weather-house which only shows roughly suspension. The calamity which has overhung the city when the atmosphere is moist and when it is dry. But then, for years which Lord Dalliousie strove in vain to avert, in order to be of any use to the world, his intellect must be and the fear of which has at intervals strained and baffled the employed on transactions which, though complicated to the ingenuity of half the Engineers of Bengal, is officially admitted eye, are capable of being reduced to simple natural causes, the to be already at hand. It is possible, even probable, that working of which Mr. Cobden thoroughly understands. When before the new year begins, the telegram may announce that. he applies the same power of conceiving transactions to the Calcutta, the single trading port of Bengal having direct general affairs of the world he entirely misinterprets them, communication with the sea, is inaccessible to any ship over owing to his exceedingly small insight into human motives. For six hundred tons, that is, to any ship not greatly below the example, he conceived very clearly and vividly what a serious average of those employed in the trade. The possibility of exhortation to rob English landowners would mean in English some such occurrence, though not greatly canvassed in society society. He conceived very clearly and vividly the social advan- —the tendency of Calcutta merchants being always to believe - tages of anonymousness, and also the social advantages of a re- that everything will last their time—has been recognized by putation for editing or managing the Times. But he utterly went Government for years, and was we believe, the one argument astray when he tried to simplify these transactions by referring which overcame the excessive local reluctance to construct as them to their motives. The same faculty which enables him to approach to the deep salt-water creek, about twenty-five picture with so much liveliness and force the real meaning of miles from the city, which is called on most of the maps the commercial or financial events, of which most men entertain but ,, river ,, Mutlah.
that t conceives common transactions of this kind only last
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