The Case of Richard Cobden

Author(s): H. Donaldson Jordan

Source: Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society , 1971, Third Series, Vol. 83
(1971), pp. 34-45
Published by: Massachusetts Historical Society

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25080706

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Massachusetts Historical Society is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend
access to Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society

This content downloaded from

194.27.153.96 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 15:46:58 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The Case of Richard Cobden
H. Donaldson Jordan*
Richard Cobden is only a secondary figure in the public life of
Victorian England. He is easily filed away under the con
- venient labels of free trade and the peace movement, and
only once or possibly twice was he a real mover in significant political
events. To be sure, his name, always coupled with that of John Bright,
is sometimes used to indicate an "age" or an "era" when for a time the
industrial middle class took center stage, but if we measure a political
figure by his success in reaching and handling the levers of power, he
was a failure. After the great victory of the repeal of the corn laws, his
career was largely anticlimax. His own Manchester refused to follow
him; his business faded away, his speculative investments also; and
he made his home in the depths of rural Sussex. In the latter years of
his not very long life?he died at 60?he sometimes likened his own
position to that of the outcast Ishmael.
If it is hard to believe that the corn laws would have survived much
longer had Cobden never lived; if we remember that the political
public rejected with enthusiasm his ideas about war and peace, and
that neither in speeches nor writings did he leave anything that is now
must reading even for students, what then remains as reason for call
ing him to mind in our time? It is the thesis of this paper that there is
a case for looking at his career again, and I will try to state it.
Cobden was born in the middle class of a quiet rural region hardly
touched by the forces of social change. Three years after the battle of
Waterloo, at the age of 14, the youngster was launched on the wider
sea of commercial London. Apprenticed in the warehouse of a firm
selling cotton prints on commission, young Cobden became in time a
successful salesman. Such he always remained, rightly priding himself
on his informed and rational persuasiveness. At the same time he de
veloped a great appetite for knowledge of the world in which he found
himself. He wrote to his brother: "You know that I do not live except
to learn." Untrammeled by previous education, he read widely and
without guidance, and when he was finally promoted to the road and
went on his first extensive trip, he blossomed at once into the most
* This paper was read at the February 19 71 meeting.

This content downloaded from

194.27.153.96 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 15:46:58 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The Case of Richard Cobden 3 5
enthusiastic and observant of travelers. To form just opinions of dis
tant places, one should see for oneself. One writer suggests that his
class was the tourist class. Certainly it was his invariable habit to
master the relevant facts in any question to which he addressed at
tention.
Winning business success in Manchester before he was 30, Cobden
without pause moved on to become an agitator for social and political
change. He made himself something of a specialist in methods of
working on opinion for a cause: soliciting funds, feeding the news
paper and pamphlet presses, finding lecturers, suggesting meetings,
committees, tea parties. Already with experience when the Anti-Corn
Law League was formed, he devoted to its cause the seven most stren
uous years of his life. Incidentally, he let the business which supported
him fade away entirely. In 1846 the League emerged as a major factor
in the affairs of the nation, and it is no wonder that to conservatives
Cobden seemed leader of a band of terrible men, a strange northern
tribe of Gradgrind manufacturers threatening the very foundations of
the community as they knew it. If, as soon appeared, this was mere
caricature, it is still true that the repeal of the corn laws was a victory
by new forces over the older landed aristocracy. Cobden's later career
was tinged by the suspicion that he had or might have an army at his
back.
It is hard to see Cobden leading an army. To use our current term,
he lacked charisma, and what is more he lacked the urge to power.
While Bright with his pugnacity never quite gave up the hope that he
and his friend might again march at the head of a new crusade against
what they privately called "our feudal masters," Cobden was more
realistic. The middle classes and the increasingly educated elite of the
workers just could not produce another issue on which a general cam
paign might be based, or, be it said, the large contributors whose
money had made the League what it was. For two or three years the
attempt was made, with little more result than further additions to the
number of little movements already in existence. We have antislavery
and aborigines' protection; temperance and international peace; move
ments for financial, administrative, and educational reform, for a free
press, for redress of Dissenters' grievances, and for changes in the
land laws and the laws of marriage. The list is endless. Cobden, though
retaining his seat in Parliament, was left without a specific mission. He

This content downloaded from

194.27.153.96 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 15:46:58 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 3 6 Massachusetts Historical Society
was reduced to acting as a sort of expert consultant to promoters of
good causes. As such he had a recognizable role, for he was respected
as a political tactician and for his command of facts and effectiveness in
debate. But he had no party, while domestic calamity and chronic ill
health made continuous public effort impossible. Again we must ask:
Why fuss about him? The corn laws aside, and perhaps his so-called
pacifism, is there any further meaning to his career?
Let us return to the theme of class. Sociologically-minded his
torians are finally teaching us that the familiar term "middle class"
must properly be read in the plural, that the British middle classes
covered by far the widest share of the country's spectrum of occupa
tions and goals, of security and insecurity, of regional cultures and
moral concerns. Cobden was very conscious that he belonged to the
middle class ("our order," as he called it in letters to Bright), but it
was an idealized rather than an actual class. The middle class would
provide leadership in the essential task of moving the nation toward an
infinitely hopeful future. Unknowingly, he read the middle class in
terms of himself. His middle class were the men, wherever found,
who shared his faith in the improvability of man's estate.
For Cobden had a vision. It was not sharp and programmatic like
those of such men as Charles Fourier and Robert Owen, but in its way
it was almost equally compelling. What differentiates him most
clearly among the political figures of his time is a quality of personal
independence. All his life he remained something of an outsider, a
newcomer in the environments in which he found himself. Yet he felt
little need to attain his identity by the conquest of wealth and status.
He was always his own man, sure of his own self-respect. Hence, it
seems, his capacity for looking at institutions and events with a certain
objectivity. He saw them from his own point of view, not from that
of any group or class.
Cobden's ideas were quite without originality. Like so many men in
his industrial age, he combined a philosophy of progress and expan
sion with the 18th-century confidence in human rationality. And with
these, a strong current, went the moral imperatives of a deeply Chris
tian culture. Realization of the future would be achieved through a
three-fold process of improvement: the enhancement of wealth, wel
fare, and morality.
Cobden's view of his field of action was completed when he was

This content downloaded from

194.27.153.96 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 15:46:58 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The Case of Richard Cobden 37
hardly over 30, years before the corn law struggle. None of his bi
ographers has been able to find anything very remarkable about the
period of self-education when he acquired nearly the full stock of his
ideas. Walter Bagehot regretted that Cobden had not been to a uni
versity and that he neither possessed nor understood "the traditional
education of his country." Yet if consistency and comprehensiveness of
outlook are marks of a philosophic reformer, he was one. His starting
point was the rational individual who will choose the better course
rather than the worse when the choice is clearly presented. It is a
Platonic belief, though there is no indication that Cobden had read
Plato. The development of the free individual is thus the criterion by
which the man of action should establish his priorities. But Cobden re
garded himself as a practical man; he wanted to see results rather than
to preach at large. He played his part in many causes, from elementary
education and the promotion of penny postage and vote by ballot to
such an arcane matter as the reform of maritime law. His strong tem
peramental bent was for wholehearted devotion to a single task, but
after the corn laws he found no way to satisfy it. Improvement was not
a goal but a highly pluralistic process. Furthermore, Cobden lacked
the physical strength to continue as a great agitator. It is not surprising
that the breadth and unity of his vision were masked from most con
temporaries?and, it may be added, from many posthumous com
mentators.
Let us try to state the underlying coherence of Cobden's opinions.
He wanted above all to remove the obstacles which limited men's ca
pacity for development. Among these were the corn laws, which low
ered the general standard of living and diminished the ability of the
world's peoples to cooperate in satisfying their material needs. Only
with increasing comfort derived from their own efforts will men be
able to command the tools enabling them to attain enlightenment and
morality. Free trade, for a time, seemed to him a panacea. When the
Anti-Corn Law League held its final meeting to celebrate victory,
Cobden's words were: "Why, gentlemen, it is a world's revolution and
nothing else." It was not the material consequences of free trade that
he acclaimed but its corollaries. Now was the time when human en
ergies and the infinite resources they could employ should be directed
to the tasks of improvement. Economy, peace, toleration of differences
among individuals and between peoples were also essential. Cobden

This content downloaded from

194.27.153.96 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 15:46:58 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 3 8 Massachusetts Historical Society
reserved particular indignation against religious bigotry by whomever
shown. But it was war and preparations for war that seemed to him the
most formidable barrier to improvement. Perhaps his most unaristo
cratic, possibly petit bourgeois, aversion to wastefulness and display
was partly behind this, for in his view war was the most wasteful of
all human activities and the major source of cruel and immoral con
duct. After the suppression of the Indian Mutiny and during British
wars with Persia and China, he broke out to Bright: "I consider that
we as a nation are little better than brigands, murderers, and poison
ers, in our dealings at this moment with half the population of the
globe." That his so-called pacifism was also part of his vision of im
provement is clear enough. Combating a brief invasion panic in 1853,
when France had come under the rule of a new Napoleon, Cobden
addressed his countrymen in a pamphlet, 1793 and 1853. We English,
he wrote, have an unequaled energy of character, always ready for
projects of daring and enterprise, but we need to use these qualities
"for abating the spirit of war, and correcting the numberless moral
evils from which society is suffering. Are not our people uneducated?
Juvenile delinquents uncared for? Does not drunkenness still reel
through our streets? Have we not to battle with vice, crime, and their
parent ignorance, in every form? " Americans remembering the decade
of Vietnam will recognize the language. Cobden expressed his whole
position very directly in a speech at Manchester in 1851. After 1846,
he said: "I set myself a certain task in public life. I thought that the
natural and collateral consequence of Free Trade was first to en
deavour to give the people, along with physical comfort and pros
perity, improved intellectual and moral advantages. ... I set myself
the task, as a public man, of endeavouring to stand prominently for
ward as the advocate of education, peace, and retrenchment."
Cobden's part in the life of his time, it seems to me, was more un
usual, almost anomalous, than he or others realized. Whig politicians
could never understand why this man, a national figure, would not so
conduct himself as to come into high oifice and try his capacities in the
company of the men of power and responsibility. But Cobden could
not play the game by the ordinary rules. He led no "party," for al
though many people agreed with him on individual issues, only a
few?not including John Bright?shared his full outlook. He was
held away from his allies among the Dissenters by differences on edu

This content downloaded from

194.27.153.96 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 15:46:58 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The Case of Richard Cobden 3 9
cation and foreign policy; from the Peace Society and the Quakers by
his rejection of nonresistant pacifism; from writers and intellectuals
by his lack of education; and from the lobby, club, and dinner-table
contacts of political life by poor health and dislike for what he thought
ephemeral, petty, or intriguing. The Reform Club was for him an evil
institution.
It is no wonder that Cobden was often written off as "un-English"
even by authentic liberals. His enthusiasm for the American example
in education and cheap government marked him as republican. His
opposition to the Crimean War marked him as unpatriotic. His later
insistence that the despot, Napoleon III, harbored no hostile designs
against the island home of freedom and the occasions when he con
demned with indignation actions of his countrymen abroad under
lined the point. In 1857 Cobden, for an instant at the head of all Lord
Palmerston's enemies, attacked his government for the action of the
British authorities at distant Hong Kong in bombarding the city of
Canton. The prime minister retorted that to listen to Cobden's speech
was painful. "There pervaded the whole of it," he said, "an anti
English feeling, an abnegation of all those ties which bind men to their
country and to their fellow-countrymen. . . . Everything that was En
glish was wrong, and everything that was hostile to England was
right."
Cobden and Palmerston were made to be opposed. Palmerston was
a man of the pre-industrial 18th century, his ideas of the national in
terest molded by the great wars with France. His generation had seen
England survive and grow strong through her own efforts, guided by
her established leaders and institutions. The business of the statesman
was to see that his country was strong and that her influence (of course
beneficial) was felt wherever she had reasons for concern. Reforms
and improvement at home could be left to the slow forces of change.
It was immediate problems, to be solved by the application of skill and
experience, that interested him. Cobden, on the other hand, tested the
present not by the past but by the future. There was where the national
interest lay. His insistence that public policy should be shaped by a
long view ahead was the most un-English thing about him.
The two men met mainly on the field of foreign and defense policy.
The years I am speaking of, 1848 to 1865, were not only ones of
bustling prosperity but for the political public were filled with the din

This content downloaded from

194.27.153.96 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 15:46:58 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 40 Massachusetts Historical Society
of revolutions, wars, and clashes in Asia and America. The mood of
the nation was a blend of self-confidence and insecurity which Palmer
ston, and perhaps Queen Victoria, accurately reflected. Interesting
debates flared up momentarily, as in the Don Pacifico and Canton af
fairs, but Cobden was always anxious to bring men's minds to serious
consideration of broad principles. Such was not the British way in
politics. It was not until 1859 that it approached possibility. His long
est confrontation with Palmerston began with the great Franco-Aus
trian war in Italy that is now remembered as the major step toward
Italian unification. For Englishmen the power and inscrutability of
purpose of Napoleon III, with expressions in some French quarters of
rooted hostility to England, aroused fears of invasion. The Volunteer
movement sprang up to provide a citizen force to resist an invading
army from France, and into it swarmed much of the cream of the com
fortable gentry and middle class. At the same time there was growing
recognition of a technological revolution in the navies which seemed
to make nonsense of the old arithmetic of comparative strengths.
Many really thought that Napoleon might soon be able to throw an
overwhelming army into England overnight. Palmerston, prime min
ister again, responded with extensive and expensive measures of de
fense. They included not only the navy itself but elaborate land forti
fications at the Channel ports which were its bases. Cobden, at the
opposite pole, utterly denied the premises. The invasionists, he said,
have their facts all wrong. The French Emperor has no idea whatever
of attacking. On the contrary, he is resolved to avoid the fatal error
of the first Napoleon; peace with Britain is the cardinal point in his
policy. And even if it were otherwise, there is still no reason for panic.
England certainly should, and most surely will, maintain adequate
naval strength. To the Liverpool Peace Society he said flatly that he
would rather see the national debt doubled than that a French army
should be in England, even as friends. But, he assured all his corre
spondents, anyone who will take the trouble will find that the French
Ministry of Marine and their dockyards and naval stations are making
no offensive preparations. The English people are being bamboozled
by shortsighted and selfish persons who reck little of the country's
true needs.
Debate in the cabinet, Parliament, and press went on without reach
ing further conclusion. Cobden pressed hard for negotiation with

This content downloaded from

194.27.153.96 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 15:46:58 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The Case of Richard Cobden 41
France on an agreement for limiting naval construction in both coun
tries but without success. The naval revolution continued, though with
slowly diminishing competitive tones. The fortifications were built
despite Cobden's efforts to show that they were so badly designed as
to be almost useless for their purpose. (Twenty-five years later they
were still without guns and were locally known as "Palmerston's
Folly.")
John Bull's hide proved impermeable on this question. On another
and broader one, Cobden gained a small triumph. Ever more strongly
he had come to believe that the national habit of thinking that En
gland's weight could be effectively brought to bear anywhere in the
world was her besetting sin. He had attacked this propensity in his
earliest writings, and by the 1860s his conviction was almost an obses
sion. Nonintervention in the affairs of other peoples is the only true
foreign policy. Cobden's moment came in 1864, when Prussia and
Austria overran the Kingdom of Denmark in a forcible settlement of
the once-famous Schleswig-Holstein question. English feelings were
aroused. Here, in a region of traditional and actual British interests,
was a small country assailed by two large ones. And Denmark had just
provided England with a beauteous Princess of Wales, Tennyson's
"sea-king's daughter." How could this be tolerated? Many months of
heated public discussion accompanied prolonged and fumbling British
and French diplomacy until finally there was clear need for immediate
and open decision. There was no hope of aid for Denmark unless by
England alone. Could it be given? Divided to the end but realistic at
last, Palmerston's cabinet decided it could not. The announcement was
a blow to Britain's standing as a European power and, equally, to her
self-esteem.
If there had been a feasible alternative policy, Palmerston's gov
ernment could not have survived. As it was, a Conservative motion of
censure was unavoidable, although the party's leaders were by no
means in a hurry to displace the 80-year-old premier. Cobden saw his
chance. Here was the case that demonstrated his principle. Countering
the censure motion with an amendment affirming the wisdom of the
decision to keep out of war, he could chastise the ministry and support
it at the same time. There was pleasing irony in seeing Palmerston's
most vehement critic coming to his rescue. However, and this was
what Cobden wanted, an extensive debate of four days was only partly

This content downloaded from

194.27.153.96 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 15:46:58 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 42 Massachusetts Historical Society
political, and a number of members from both parties proved willing
to discuss the question of intervention in his general terms. Press com
ment did this even more.
Cobden had high hopes that a revolution in foreign policy had taken
place. Even The Times conceded that "it is best to admit that we can
not do everything" and called for "a complete reform in our system of
foreign diplomacy." Cobden remarked: "I never had so many private
adhesions to my views as I did from men on both sides after speaking."
He was sure that what he called the week's wrangle had done much
good. A few months later, in his annual speech to his constituents in
Rochdale, he put the position he held in its utmost simplicity. Let us
quote: "I do not think I am responsible for seeing right and truth and
justice carried out all over the world. I think, if we had that responsi
bility, Providence would have invested us with more power than He
has. I don't think we can do it, and there's an end of it." But as his
euphoria cooled, he realized that the change in the public mind still
had far to go.
This, the last big episode in Cobden's career, marks well the real
nature of his role. His countrymen, and the world eventually, must
be led to change their views. He thought of himself as a teacher of
practical truths and welcomed Disraeli's brilliantly coined term, "the
Manchester School." After the repeal of the corn laws and the tri
umphant but unique success of a great pressure group, Cobden's part
was primarily a direct approach to the political public and the en
lightened middle class. His available means were Parliament, pam
phlets, and an unresting correspondence.
However, he had abiding interest in a broader attack. He wanted
the people at large to become educated and thus free. Cobden's very
first public activity was in promotion of a school in his little factory
village of Sabden. He was an influential leader in the movement to
obtain schooling for all regardless of sectarian prejudices. The im
portance he gave this is shown in a letter to John Bright on the very
eve of the Crimean War to explain why he could not attend a political
meeting. He wrote : "I can't consent to slur over the Education meet
ing. That question underlies all our social and political problems. Our
people have not really been prepared for the part which in an indus
trial and constitutional country they are called on to perform." Near
the end of Cobden's life, Matthew Arnold, a bare acquaintance, tried

This content downloaded from

194.27.153.96 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 15:46:58 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The Case of Richard Cobden 43
to enlist him for the cause of secondary?that is to say, middle-class?
education; but Cobden replied that his main concern was for the chil
dren of the masses.
More and more, as his frustrations about peace and retrenchment
continued, he thought about the people. His own middle class had re
fused to accept the lessons he offered. It had let him down. His later
letters are studded with complaints of the incurable blindness, snob
bery, and lack of self-respect in Manchester and among "our people."
He commented bitterly on the Crimean War that the most belligerent
attitudes in the nation were found precisely among those, neither aris
tocrats nor populace, who took no part whatever in the fighting. To
Bright, who was urging him to join in a campaign for parliamentary
reform, he replied that the people must develop their own leaders.
Middle-class leadership in any great reform was a will-o'-the-wisp.
No one could be more candid than Cobden in assertion of the existing
illiterate, intellectually and morally incompetent, state of the masses.
At the same time he was sure of their basic soundness. This was the
reason for his frequent harping on the superior education of the people
of the United States and Germany, which rang so unpleasantly in
English ears. His belief in the development of the free and inde
pendent individual was a sort of Jeffersonian faith brought into the
urban and industrial era. Thus Cobden had none of the fears of ulti
mate democracy so common in his time. Donald Read is entirely right
in insisting that he was really more radical, more of a democrat, than
his friend John Bright.
Another approach to the problem of educating people was the de
mand for cheap newspapers of popular circulation. Cobden involved
himself quite deeply in this. The movement passed rapidly in his day
from the persistent law violations and evasions of dissentients and
radicals to one uniting erstwhile Chartists with middle-class business
men and intellectuals. Since the tax laws were the barrier, they were a
proper subject for a member of Parliament (though Cobden's friend
Gibson took the lead there), and removal of the "taxes on knowledge"
seemed a fit counterpart of the repeal of the "bread tax." It was an
act of 1855 that broke the dam by making possible the sale of papers at
a penny a copy. The resulting birthrate of new enterprises was tre
mendous, and infant mortality high. Cobden and his friends soon
started their own paper in London, where they had had no representa

This content downloaded from

194.27.153.96 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 15:46:58 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 44 Massachusetts Historical Society
tive before. It had minimal success, being too obviously the organ of
their school, although Cobden himself, with his usual alertness, of
fered very sound advice. He had, among other things, picked the
brains of Horace Greeley on the subject of a popular journal. He
bombarded the staff of the paper with warnings that circulation and
advertisers depended on pithy news attractively presented and on
good business management. Do not, he said, let the paper seem just a
mouthpiece for the opinions of me and Bright and the Peace Society.
In part, however, the popular press did meet his anticipations. Pro
vincial towns acquired their own journals for the first time; the grip
of a few London papers on general political opinion was weakened;
and total circulation was multiplied many times. So sober an observer
as John Stuart Mill judged that the press revolution was an important
cause of the good sense and forbearance shown by the Lancashire work
ing class during the severe stress of the cotton famine during the
American Civil War.
The drift of my argument is plain: Cobden is best seen not as the
political figure he appeared to be but as a shaper of opinion. He be
longs in a sort of limbo suspended between the men of decisions and
deeds and the intellectual leaders of his time such as Mill and Carlyle.
His attacking powers were directed against old habits and institutions,
not against living men. His feelings of hostility against The Times were
far stronger than against Palmerston. It was positive action that he
wanted. Replace protectionism and national exclusiveness by free
trade and commercial competition, scarcity by abundance. Wars are
and will be unnecessary and should be dealt with by retrenchment and
arbitration; ignorance by the schoolhouse; bigotry and class feeling by
self-respect and mutual tolerance. All this?and there was more?is
still recognizably liberal thinking, issuing from the middle classes of
the 19th century. But it was also Cobden's own, peculiar only in that he
held to it tenaciously in all its parts. He wrote to Bright: "I really
don't believe myself to be a whit more sincere than the rest of the
world, but I have my own particular way of seeing things, and my own
sense of duty."
John Vincent, in a few brilliantly perceptive pages, has pointed out
that Cobden's view offered the only coherent interpretation of the
world and of history available to an emerging Liberal party. That
there was need for this party was increasingly felt after the Crimean
War, though it had been in the making since long before. Palmerston's

This content downloaded from

194.27.153.96 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 15:46:58 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 The Case of Richard Cobden 45
last ministry was supposed to unite all Liberals, but for Cobden it did
nothing of the sort. After a few years' experience, he accused the prime
minister of throwing over true Liberal principles and conducting a
government more satisfactory to the Tories than their own leaders
would offer. Palmerston's answer is interesting. He said that in the
House of Commons two large parties just did not exist, since it con
sisted of "a great number of separate knots" of members. This was in
1862, and Cobden's assault did in fact fall flat. The change, however,
as everyone knew, was near. In very few years, with the death of
Palmerston and the end of the American War, it came. Soon, under
Gladstone, began the classic period of Victorian Liberalism. Cobden
had little part in the manner of its arrival.
Yet I cannot agree with Vincent in writing him off at this point, for
what came to be known as Cobdenism remained an active ingredient in
Liberalism for 50 or 60 years. It is reflected in Gladstone himself and
especially in his foreign policy and the Geneva Arbitration; in the
persistence of the free trade idea; and in the little-Englandism of the
imperialist decades. Cobdenism also appears outside the context of
political disputation. I could quote an office minute of the great Con
servative, Lord Salisbury, which uses the purest Cobdenite language
about South America. Our own Cordell Hull in his Memoirs insists
strongly on the importance of his wholehearted adoption of the Cob
denite association of free trade with peace. At a different level we find
Cobden in the writings of such men as T. H. Green, the philosopher,
J. A. Hobson, L. T. Hobhouse, and Norman Angel?.
Nothing can really be proven about this kind of influence on public
thought and opinion. Discussion of individual "influences" is better
left to the professors of literature and art and to philosophers and
scientists. My final suggestion is merely this: that Cobden's clearly ar
ticulated ideas were well adapted for use in a period of prosperity,
security, and broadening literacy. They rested on widely held ideals
and regarded reason as the ultimate implement of man. Diffusion of
such thinking, as Cobden well knew, was being enormously facilitated
by technological progress. Railways, steamships, the telegraph, the
rotary press, and the stereo plate made it at last possible for political
opinion to become the affair of the many. It could now become truly
public opinion. Liberal democracy entered on its try at reorganizing
the world. Cobden was not least among the busy ranks of its builders.

This content downloaded from

194.27.153.96 on Mon, 13 Feb 2023 15:46:58 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms