Cobden

IT must be a mortifying reflection to great men that their reputation is practically at the mercy of a biographer. Adam Smith distrustfully burned all his papers in order to avoid such chills as Carlyle’s moral nature received from Froude’s careless exposure of it. Considering the evident dangers to be feared from biographers, those who have interested themselves in the social progress of the present century, and attempted anything like an analysis of the forces at work, must feel no little satisfaction in finding so skillful a pen as Mr. Morley’s telling the story of Cobden’s share in the economic and political movements of England since the Reform Act.¹ It is a period full of subtile influences, and calls for a nice feeling of sympathy with the spirit of the time, to say nothing of historical insight and the ability to know what not to say. There is no need of disguising that the physical and material welfare of the national organism influences, as largely as in the case of the human body, its intellectual and moral condition. So it is not strange to find that economic considerations often underlie and, when appreciated, explain some of our most difficult social and moral problems. That which, probably more than anything else, will characterize the history of the last hundred years is economic and mechanical progress. This period witnessed an extraordinary development of manufactures, and all the difficulties arising from an increase and redistribution of population. The progress in labor-saving devices, which began when the Egyptian persuaded the wind to turn his water-wheel, and which was increasing the power of man over nature, resulted in the great inventions of Watt and Arkwright, to be soon followed by railways and steamships. In the twenty-one years following 1818 the fifty-seven thousand persons engaged in cotton factories in England increased to four hundred and sixty-nine thousand. The conditions affecting every man’s material welfare were rapidly changing, without there being, in many minds, even a dawning sense of the direction the movement was taking. It was not then seen that this vast increase of nonagricultural industries, without an attending change in the power and system of producing food, was a sudden call for a readjustment of the existing means by which the country was being fed. Or, as the economists say, an increased demand for food without a proportional advance in the arts of production must result in lowering the status of the poorer classes. The economic solution of the difficulty is apparent. Labor-saving devices must be introduced into the production of food. But as free international exchange is only a wider division of employments, and as this last has been adopted because it saves labor, free trade was demanded as a means of getting bread at a less exertion by the laborer. That was, briefly, the economic situation in Cobden’s time. In its consequences it led still farther. The movement to get cheaper food, as an industrial necessity, implied that any disposal of the land of the country—however sanctioned by ancient usage — which prevented this from coming about was too expensive for the community to maintain. So here we come out upon the expediency of the present system of land-holding in Great Britain by a path which starts from the beginning of the century. Society was losing patience with carrying the exhausting burdens left it by the feudal system and the prohibitory policy of Charles V.

Into this time of change and ferment, with all its possibilities for good, if rightly taken, Cobden was born in 1804, and in his sixty years he played a manly part, — indeed, achieved that kind of success which is vouchsafed to few absolute rulers of empires, to see in his own day twenty-seven millions of people, naturally conservative and prejudiced against change, yield to his way of thinking, and give him an honored old age in exchange for a manhood of bitter struggle and abuse. One’s curiosity is naturally awakened to learn what manner of man this was, and to discover what instruments he used. First of all, he typified the manufacturing interests and the middle class; he belonged to the union of forces which wrenched the Reform Act of 1832 from the aristocracy. And it was this very act which, by admitting a wider representation in Parliament, made possible the whole extraordinary movement through which the laboring and middle classes, led by Cobden, gained so large a part of their economic rights. Political ferments were preparing the way for revolution on the Continent, Chartism was rampant in England, and Mill and Arnold in their way were aiming at social improvement. But our respect for what seems the grosser and more unspiritual means of bringing about progress is vastly increased when we see Cobden, whose one idea was a better material condition of the poor, actually succeeding as none of the others succeeded. It is a suggestive fact for reformers. He did not prate of natural justice and social millenniums, but cried loudly and always for cheaper bread. He was in sympathy with all liberal aims, but with that tact and wise caution which distinguished him he confined himself and the Anti Corn-Law League strictly to the one demand for cheap food. It is easy to understand how a man who was more interested in the social and political problems of Greece than in her classic monuments would view society at home. He flung himself into the work of reform from no emotional sympathy, no fine spiritual sense, but because of a strong positive feeling for good order and just government, quickened by a prodigious vitality and a restless activity. An unshaken confidence in the perfectibility of man, a good estimate of himself, a firm grasp on his own opinions, adroitness in his tactics, patient persistence, a high character, transparent honesty, great enthusiasm and will power, were but a few of the qualities he showed. He grasped wonderfully well the essentials of a great peaceful agitation, and the history of the first successful movement of this kind is the arsenal from which reformers are every day drawing their weapons. The Irish agitation under O’Connell and the Scotch religious rebellion under Chalmers afford suggestive contrasts to the Anti Corn-Law League led by Cobden. The English leader evidently dominated men by his superior moral force as well as by his more extensive and accurate knowledge ; but at the same time his fine tact made him tolerant of mental slowness in others. When a stupid clergyman at the hustings insisted that scarcity could not produce dearness, Cobden did not meet him with sarcasm, but replied that he need not fear repeal, then, because, by his own showing, abundance could not produce cheapness. This readiness in reply, an ingenuity in adapting his arguments and illustrations to the needs of persuasion, his logic, his argumentative shrewdness, his apparent sense of honest conviction, and his perfect control of the facts bearing on the question naturally impressed the great numbers whom he addressed by pamphlet, through the newspaper, or in monster meetings ; but all these qualities in a man of great energy of character made him bitterly hated by the aristocratic party when he appeared in Parliament. To them he was the millowner, the man who said things hard to answer; in his person he was the disagreeable industrial class actually creeping into the nation’s great assembly. Yet he won a respectful hearing from the House by dint of hard blows. An Englishman reverences facts. Cobden did not generalize. He was not afraid, as Mr. Morley says, of the vulgarity of details ; and when he spoke of the wretched poor it was in this wise : “ He knew of a place where a hundred wedding-rings had been pawned in a single week to provide bread; and of another place where men and women subsisted on boiled nettles, and dug up the decayed carcass of a cow rather than perish of hunger.” He was neither Whig nor Tory, but a Repealer, first and always. Of the Whigs, from whom liberal tendencies were to be expected, he said, “ The worst danger is of the Whigs coming in again too soon. The hacks would be up on their hind legs, and at their old prancing tricks again, immediately they smelt the treasury crib.” Cobden’s personal combats in the House were bitter and angry. The League was unfashionable, not respectable to nice eyes and ears, and its leader was the “Manchester moneygrubber,” before whose blows the “ representatives of the blood of the Norman chivalry ” were shrinking. But even his enemies respected his courage. It was probably the same vehemence and lack of moderation which he later displayed in the debates on the Crimean war that once gave Peel, when in power, an opportunity for charging him with offering menaces and insinuations of assassination in order to force the ministry to move repeal. It was undoubtedly a brilliant piece of acting on Peel’s part, but the sensation produced at the time was tremendous. Peel broke down, trembling with excitement; shouts rose; Cobden tried to explain, but the House brutally roared him down. The courage necessary to face the House of Commons in such moods, and to do his part manfully, can scarcely be overestimated, especially when we recall, as Mr. Morley has very delicately implied, that, so far as domestic sympathy was concerned, Cobden was fighting the battle alone. Indeed, it is rather pathetic to read Mrs. Cobden’s remark in later years to her husband : “ I sometimes think that, after all the good work you have done, and in spite of fame and great position, it would have been better for us both if, after you and I married, we had gone to settle in the backwoods of Canada; ” and to learn from the biographer that, “ after looking for a moment or two with a gaze of mournful preoccupation through the window of the carriage,” Cobden replied “ that he was not sure that what she said was not too true.”

To the world at large his appearance was agreeable, but not striking. A large head, a candid eye, features illuminated by intelligence, sympathy, and earnestness, a winning expression about the mouth, a clear and penetrating voice, and a portly frame made up no extraordinary presence. In his speeches Cobden was direct, vigorous, and persuasive; but one is unwilling to admit Mr. Morley’s claim that his style was well-nigh perfect of its kind when he delivers himself as follows : “ You speak with a loud voice when you are talking on the floor of the House ; and if you have anything to say that hits hard, it is a very long whip, and reaches all over the kingdom.” In fact, Mr. Morley’s firm touch and finished sentences force many a comparison to be drawn unfavorable to Cobden’s English.

Mere persuasiveness in speaking, however, was not the only instrument by which success was finally won for the League in 1846. Indeed, the Anti CornLaw association did not originate with Cobden, but with the London group made up of Grote, Molesworth, Hume, and Roebuck; but when Cobden brought to the idea his singular faculty for organization it became a new thing. From the central council at Manchester they sent forth orators and lecturers, — often to meet with personal violence ; they organized associations everywhere ; held district meetings, tea-parties, bazars; published songs; set up an organ, and issued showers of small pamphlets. Their object was to make votes in the House ; hence they classified the boroughs, and bent all their energies on the class called doubtful. In the House their leaders were bold in denouncing the government whenever they fell short of their duty. In short, the League created a powerful public opinion outside of Parliament in favor of the repeal of the sliding scale of duties on corn, and they frightened the aristocracy. Yet simple economic explanation would have gone for nothing, certainly for many years, had the League not been favored by two fortunate circumstances. Peel, the great Tory leader, had a mind fitted for the discussion and understanding of economic questions, and he was vincible by the truth. Still he dallied with the truth until the depression of trade, the serious condition of the laboring classes, and finally the failure of the potato crop in Ireland forced him into the conviction that repeal was absolutely imperative. His dramatic position and the story of his political ostracism are matters of history.

The natural foreign policy of the free trader was one of peace, and during the career of Lord Palmerston no one opposed him more persistently than Cobden. When Tennyson’s Maud came out, during the Crimean war, “ full of beautiful poetry and barbarous politics,” and the poet inveighed against

Cobden wrote to his close companion in the Corn-Law agitation, John Bright, “ It is enthroning the devil in the place of the God of mercy, truth, love, and justice.” The “long, long canker of peace ” was Cobden’s constant aim in his later parliamentary career. Indeed, it was no small part of the philosophy at the bottom of his successful negotiations with Chevalier for the famous Commercial Treaty with France in 1860.

With the aristocracy, whom he had so vehemently attacked, he could not associate, even when asked to join the cabinet by Lord Palmerston. It was like the man, but it was an experience new to the hungry office-seeking mind of Cambridge House. With manly courtesy Lord Palmerston received Cobden’s refusal to take office by the polite remark that “ Lady Palmerston receives to-morrow evening at ten.” In a letter to his brother-in-law (not to his wife), the modern Fabricius says, “ The next evening I was at Cambridge House for the first time, and found myself among a crowd of fashionables and politicians, and was the lion of the party. The women came and stared with their glasses at me, and then brought their friends to stare also. As I came away, Jacob Omnium and I were squeezed into a corner together, and he remarked, ' You are the greatest political monster that ever was seen in this house. There never was before seen such a curiosity as a man who refused a cabinet office from Lord Palmerston, and then came to visit him here.’ ” Cobden and Mr. Bright once again broke out into open hostilities against their old enemies of the aristocracy in a bold championship of the North during our civil war. In such causes the great agitator was eager unto the end, and he died in harness. Traveling up to London with a desire to share in the discussions of Parliament, he met the shadow of death, and reached the city only to watch the bleak wind blow the smoke past his window for a day or two, and died while the bells of St. Martin’s were ringing for morning service, April 2, 1865.