TOPICS OF THE DAY.
"THE THREE PANICS."
IT is with a weary sigh of disappointment that we lay down Mr. Cobden's latest pamphlet. England does so want an economist statesman, and he is in many respects so excellently fitted for the task he so unnecessarily evades. We have men by the dozen on whom the country is content to rely for the little political legislation we at this moment need. There are among us a few to whom we may look with hope for the settlement of those far greater social questions, which as the years pass on bid fair to supersede all others. There are one or two statesmen left who really understand foreign affairs, who have a policy which is not simply one of expedients, which good or bad will march, and with which the rest of the world can enter into some intelligible rela- tion. We have found men who can reconstruct a fleet ; we could find them to reconstruct the army ; we shall find them competent to lead the van in that battle of science which will in a few years once again redistribute power. But we have no economist, no man who while able to comprehend the necessity for defending the greatness as well as the independence of England, can still so organize our re- sources as to secure our full strength without urging on intolerable exertions. Lord Palmerston, perhaps on every other subject the best representative of broad common sense, has no more notion of thrift than any other Irish Peer. Earl Russell seldom or never talks finance. Sir C. Lewis, Sir C. Wood, and the rest of the first-class men of second-rate grasp, either confound imperial finance with Treasury accounts, or find revenue and expenditure enough to manage without enforcing administrative reform. Mr. Gladstone, who understands the whole subject, and would, we dare say, if permitted, almost extinguish the income tax, always begins at the wrong end. Whether from want of sympathy with public opinion, or from an over-esti- mate of the advantages of thriftiness in se, he always provokes the suspicion that he would save by incurring risks, instead of diminishing waste. The whole Tory party, often produc- tive of good economists, is for the moment debarred from economy alike by its traditions, its avowed distrust of the Bonapartes, and its foreign position. Mr. Bright has never, that we know of, taken the trouble to effect one administra- tive reduction. There remains Mr. Cobden ; and Mr. Cob- den, with all his defects, might do England this service if he would, and earii in doing so the sway and the name which he, in his secret heart, thinks the constitution reserves for scions of great Whig Houses. He can speak, as he showed in the corn law agitation, with a force which instructs English- men while it convinces them—a faculty of the rarest and most valuable kind. He is not afraid of figures, of the actual painful labour from which his burlier-minded rival seems to us always to shrink. He is not possessed by the notion that invasion might be but a trifle, and not unwilling to believe—though he cannotfee/—that Englishmen ought to be great as well as free. If he were to set himself de- liberately to prohibit waste, to compel the departments to give us penny-worths for our pennies, to reduce every service to the e]eact level of working strength, to bring England, as it were, into training by extirpating all superfluous flesh and carrying off all needless food, he would have a following no Cabinet could attempt to despise. His own class would follow him to a man. The thinkers and writers at whom he rails would forgive him all his contempt. And the country gentlemen whom he distrusts, but who like heavy taxation as little as he does, would follow him into the lobby as they over and over again followed Sir Robert Peel. In- stead of doing this, Mr. Cobden shows his capacity by carry- ing out a profitable commercial treaty, and then sits down to tell all Englishmen that they have time and again shown a good deal of credulity. It is a very able pamphlet the "Three Panics," and would be a very convincing one, only that it is so entirely beside the mark. Mr. Cobden shows, with a lucid force which is the specialty of his writings, that the three panics which have occurred within the last fourteen years were all un- founded. Louis Philippe had no intention of invading Eng- land when the pamphlet of the Prince de Joinville and the Duke of Wellington's letter threw England into a fever. Louis Napoleon had no idea of attacking us when everybody was saying that we might find ourselves any week without the command of the Channel, and with a French army en- camped upon our coast. He had still less intention when, in 1859, the nation at last decided that TIngland was unde- fended, and that the navy must once more be brought up to its ancient proportionate strength. Mr. Cobden has his array of anecdotes to prove that France rather quizzed us, that French Ministers joked on our alarms, that the Em- peror was occupied with anything rather than English inva- sions, and his anecdotes are very much better than that kind of literature can usually pretend to be. He hints, and with some justice, that the Services have immense weight in Eng- land, and are inclined to believe every addition to their own numbers a benefit to the world. He ridicules, and with power, the notion that France could turn buccaneer or land an army in a night, or march over England as if it were tenanted by Asiatics. He compiles, very carefully, a table which demonstrates, very clearly, the enormous expenditure to which these three panics have led, and hints, very forcibly, that the Merrimac very nearly produced a fourth. And, having done all this, he has done nothing, for he has entirely missed the point.
The reason for the last panic was not anything the French ruler of the hour might intend to do, but what he had, if he chose, the power to accomplish. Thinking men might be satisfied that France desired peace and not war, but they knew none the less that even if that were so England still owed her security to foreign forbearance. This was the feeling which galled the nation, and which Mr. Cobden never can understand. He professes to consider the will of the people the supreme law of politics, but never will acknowledge that will when it calls for a self-reliant attitude. In 1847 no doubt, men were overborne in no slight degree by the mere authority of the Duke of Wellington. In 1852 they were alarmed, and with more reason, by what seemed an overt menace, the restoration of a dynasty whose chief had declared that he represented the principle of equality, and the defeat of Waterloo. But in 1859 they had arrived at a distinct conclu- sion, so emphatic that it has ever since influenced our politics, so little exaggerated that after three years it has produced no reaction. They held that these panics must cease, and that to make them cease it was necessary so to organize England that her consciousness of independent strength should for the future prevent the alarms which had recently followed every shock to our trust in American amity aud French good faith. To say that the Executive deceived the people, as Mr. Cobden so often hints, is simply to falsify facts by confounding effect and cause. The people took the matter into' their own hands, raised Lord Palmerston to power because he would, they thought, re-establish the national strength, insisted upon a new navy, and themselves filled up the ranks of the Volunteers. Only this fast week they showed just the same determination. The Executive wanted exceedingly to pooh-pooh the battle in the James' River, and it was the House of Commons which, urged on by out- side pressure, insisted on suspending the fortifications and hurrying on the iron-clad navy. The" Services" gain nothing by that change, and one of them is very likely to lose. That the armaments may have been overdone we are not disposed to deny. There is a tendency to increase every squadron as well as the Channel and Mediterranean fleets which requires to be harshly bridled. The regular army, too, has been developed in a way Englishmen scarcely understand, and there is a downright juggle in the sort of military chasm executed between India and England, for which Lord Can- ning, if he chose, could call part of the Cabinet to a severe account. There is a disposition to rely, too, on engineers, and to fortify places which do not want fortification as well as those which do, which cannot be too severely condemned. The works at Alderney, for example, which have cost a million, and will cost two more, are pure and simple waste, as much as if the money were flung into the sea. But Mr. Cobden will touch none of these sore points. If he cannot amputate the limb, the ulcer may slough unhealed. He wants no fortifications at all instead of thrifty but sufficient constructions, and actually lays down this as a fundamental principle : "We must consent to incur some risk." That is precisely what in the present state of Europe the people are not prepared to do. Sir R. Peel, when he used the phrase, qualified it by the prefix "in time of peace." We are not at peace except in the most technical sense, but maintaining amidst armed and envenomed European factions a dignified neutrality. It is a most wasteful neutrality, one which presses hard upon the sources of national strength, and which may ultimately be found intolerable ; but it is the adjectives not the substantive with which the people quarrel. It is the waste not the neutrality we want to abolish, the security not the extravagance which we desire to retain. The country, for instance, needs iron ships, not because the Monitor may appear in the Thames, or the Merrimac frighten the Clyde, but because we have, for the sake of our trade, to be strongest in all four quarters of the globe. It is quite certain that we shall have the iron-clad fleet. It is very probable that the Admiralty, hampered by traditions, and bowed down by dockyard interests, will try to go on building wooden vessels and laying in timber also. Let Mr. Cobden try to stop that. He is himself apparently quite aware that iron has superseded wood. Let him in the course of the Session endeavour to compel the Admiralty to give up the use of in- consistent means of defence, to adopt some definite principle, and to lay down some system which shall raise us to the re- quired strength without a demand for more millions. The de- partments know as well as we do that the sums already voted, if steadily devoted to iron, will keep us more than abreast of the world, and only want to be told that Parliament will for the present endure no other course. But no, the Session will end as it began. The men who really care about the national honour will not defend the national purse ; the men who are anxious for thrift will try to enforce it by reducing our security, and the only contest will be as of old between the statesmen and the economists.
One word we may add with advantage, though to many of our readers it may sound like a truism. To the great mass of Englishmen there is something which is as dear as inde- pendence, and that is our imperial rank. If we are not, after all our sacrifices, to be citizens of a great as well as a safe empire, constituents of a power which has no superior, which can, when the need arises, bid a successful tyrant pause, or strike one strong blow for a principle, or maintain freedom of speech though all despots are savage with annoy- ance, thke is no longer savour in life. That is the conclu- sion of every man who understands English history, the one passion which reigns permanently among those masses upon whom Mr. Cobden professes to rely, the one instinct which with Englishmen is stronger than argument or suffering, and with which the statesman of the future, be he sovereign or democrat, will then, as now, have first of all to reckon. Wise thrift stops no enterprise, and we need it bitterly, but it is not under a cheap but powerless re'gime that English- men intend to live. "
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