Born at Heyshott, near Midhurst, Sussex, England, June 3, 1804: died at London, April 2, 1865. An English statesman and political economist, especially noted as an advocate of free trade and of peace, and as the chief supporter of the Anti-Corn-Law League 1839–46. He began, in partnership with others, the business of calico-printing in 1831; entered Parliament in 1841; visited the United States in 1854; and negotiated an important commercial treaty between England and France 1859–60. During the Civil War in the United States he was a supporter of the cause of the North. His “Political Writings” were published in 1867; his “Speeches on Questions of Public Policy” (ed. Bright and Rogers) in 1870.

Personal

  Went to the House of Commons and heard Cobden bring on his arbitration motion to produce universal peace. He has a good face, and is a clear, manly speaker. A French lady who was with us in our little box, informed us that she was staying at his house, that she had travelled with him and his wife in Spain, and concluded by accepting him as her standard of perfection.

  Cobden in physiognomy and appearance might almost pass for an American, and has a certain New England sharpness and shrewdness in his way of dealing with a subject. His address was argumentative, and yet there was a certain popular clearness about it, a fertility of familiar illustrations, and an earnest feeling which made it uncommonly impressive.

  Cobden is a man of an extremely interesting mind; quite the opposite of an Englishman in this respect, that you never hear him talk commonplaces, and that he has few prejudices.

  Take him all in all, Mr. Cobden is a man of rare intelligence, of unswerving industry, and of spotless integrity. In qualities of head and heart, we believe him to be excelled by few men. His conscientiousness is of the highest order. Though he has had much political enmity to encounter, no one has ever charged him with doing a mean thing, or prostituting the great power he unquestionably wielded to subserve any personal or selfish end. His eloquence—or rather his persuasiveness—is remarkable. He practises none of the graces of the orator. His style is simple, almost homely, but thoroughly logical and convincing; and his matter is always full of facts. He emphatically hits the nail on the head, clinching it at both sides. In person he is pale, lean, and wiry, of melancholic features; and his voice is thin, and sounds somewhat nasal. Yet, with these personal disadvantages, the influence which he exercises as a speaker is something extraordinary. We believe the secret to lie in his immense fund of common sense, his great practical sagacity and shrewdness, his evident honesty of purpose and earnest straightforwardness, and, at the same time, the clearness and simplicity of speech which enables him to bring his reasonings and his facts completely home to the judgment, and appeal so powerfully to the silent judge in every man’s bosom.

  Not even the tragedy here can make me indifferent to the death of Richard Cobden, who was my personal friend and the friend of my country. I felt with you entirely in the touching words which you uttered in Parliament. I wish he could have lived to enjoy our triumph and to continue his counsels. His name will be cherished here as in England. History will be for him more than Westminster Abbey.

  Few who were living, and of sufficiently matured powers of observation at the time, will ever forget the sad and general impression made by the tidings of Mr. Cobden’s peaceful release, throughout the whole land, amongst all classes of its citizens, and in the great countries of Europe and in the New World. Mr. Cobden, with a patriotism as undeniable and unquenchable as ever animated a human breast, had nevertheless been the great apostle of kindliness and conciliation in international relations. And one consequence was, that he was more beloved and popular out of his own land, than ever statesman was in the history of the world. Englishmen—even those who had admired him most warmly whilst living—were astounded when they came, after his death, to realise the beauty of his character, the magnitude of his services, and the amount of what they had lost by his somewhat early departure.

  What the qualities of Mr. Cobden were in the House all present are aware; yet, perhaps, I may be permitted to say that as a debater he had few equals. As a logician he was close and complete; adroit, perhaps even subtle; yet at the same time he was gifted with such a degree of imagination that he never lost sight of the sympathies of those whom he addressed, and so, generally avoiding to drive his arguments to extremity, he became as a speaker both practical and persuasive. I believe that when the verdict of posterity shall be recorded on his life and conduct, it will be said of him that he was, without doubt, the greatest political character the pure middle class of this country has yet produced—an ornament to the House of Commons, and an honour to England.

  Mr. Cobden spoke after me [1847], and was received with unbounded enthusiasm. He then for the first time broached the doctrine about the advent of universal peace, which was so signally belied by the events of the following spring. Mr. Cobden appeared to me to be quite a monomaniac; his eye was wild, and his style of speaking was nothing more than chatting with the audience in a very business-like and effective way.

  I recollect him only as an eloquent but intolerant talker; impatient of the speech and opinions of others; very inconsecutive, and putting forth with a plethora of words misty dogmas in theology and metaphysics, partly of German origin, which he never seemed to me to clear up to his own understanding or to that of others. What has come out posthumously of his philosophy has not removed this imputation upon it.

  Though he was amply endowed with that practical wisdom which Aristotle describes as the first quality of the man who meddles with government, all his aims, his sympathies, his maxims were as open and transparent as the day. Nobody could be more free from the spirit of Machiavellian calculation. He had in a full measure the gift of tact, but it came from innate considerateness and good feeling, and not either from social art or from hidden subtlety of nature…. In his own house, where public men do not always seek the popularity that is the very breath of their nostrils abroad, he was tender, solicitous, forbearing, never exacting. Most of his preparation for speeches and pamphlets was done amid the bustle of a young household, and he preferred to work amid the sociable play of his little children. His thoroughly pleasant and genial temper made him treat everybody who approached him as a friend. Few men have attracted friends of such widely different type. The hard-headed man of business and the fastidious man of letters were equally touched by the interest of his conversation and the charm of his character. There must have been something remarkable about one who won the admiration of Prosper Mérimée, and the cordial friendship of Mr. Goldwin Smith, and the devoted service of strenuous practical men like Mr. Slagg and Mr. Thomasson. His exceeding amiability was not insipid. He was never bitter, but he knew how to hit hard, and if a friend did wrong and public mischief came of it, Cobden did not shrink from the duty of dealing faithfully with him.

  Mr. Morley says that he has asked scores of persons who knew him, Conservatives as well as Liberals, what the secret was of his influence and success as an orator, and they all agreed in using the word “persuasiveness” as Cobden’s most marked characteristic. His power of extempore argument was wonderful; simple, lucid, cogent, full of facts, he was never dry nor abstract, nor over terse; while all he said was carried home, to use Mr. Bright’s words, by “the absolute truth that shone in his eye and in his countenance.”

  When he was thirty years old, which was about the time of the Reform Bill revolution, Cobden was one of the most learned men in England; and yet in the jargon of conceited scholarship he was called “an uneducated man,” that is to say, a man whom the colleges did not know. The truth is, that although he had little schooling, few of his critics had read as many books or as many men as he had read. The best scholar is not the man who learns the most, but the man who forgets the least, and Cobden forgot little. There was not a man at Oxford who had read as many chapters in the Book of Realities as Richard Cobden had. He had studied man as a moral, intellectual, spiritual, social, agricultural, manufacturing and mercantile being, in his relations to this moral, intellectual, spiritual, social, agricultural, manufacturing, and mercantile world. His political wisdom grew out of a vast accumulation of useful knowledge; and herein it was that when he entered Parliament at thirty-seven years of age, there was not a man in the House of Commons so well equipped with political information, not one so competent in debate…. His eulogy may be condensed into this: He gave more food and better clothes, higher wages, and shorter hours of labor to all the workingmen of England.

  Cobden himself had a large share of the qualities which Englishmen rightly reverence. He was upright, honourable, and disinterested; kindly and affectionate in his private life; an excellent father, husband, and brother; sedulous in his work, simple in his habits, pleasantly free from ostentation and self-seeking ambition; and no one can question his courage, or the conscientious industry and self-sacrificing energy, with which he served the cause of humanity, according to his lights.

General

  On Saturday week I read in the newspapers the speech Cobden made at Manchester abusing the Duke of Wellington, and scouting the national defenses. On Wednesday I wrote a letter to him in the Times, which has had great success. I have received innumerable compliments and expressions of approbation about it from all quarters, and the old Duke is pleased. I had no idea of making such a hit, but the truth is, everybody was disgusted at Cobden’s impertinence and (it may be added) folly. His head is turned by all the flattery he has received, and he has miserably exposed himself since his return to England, showing that he is a man of one idea and no statesman.

  I deem him one of the most privileged, as he deserves to be one of the most honoured of his race. No man has ever been called in to exercise more important functions, and no man’s exertions have been more successful in their issue, or more unpretending in their display…. His strength has always been found in his advocacy of sound principles to be carried out in their full extension. No surrender of a truth—no compromise with an error. Yet he has always been willing to take reasonable instalments towards the payment of a just debt, he has never sacrificed an obtainable good in the pursuit of an unapproachable better, but has felt that every step forward is progress, leaving less to be done than if that step had not been taken.

  Very rarely, if even ever, in history has a man achieved so much by his words, been victor in what was thought at the time to be a class struggle, and yet spoken so little evil as Mr. Cobden. There is hardly a word to be found, perhaps, even now, which the Recording Angel would wish to blot out. We may on other grounds object to an agitator who lacerates no one; but no watchful man of the world will deny that such an agitator has vanquished one of life’s most imperious and difficult temptations.

  It is the duty of those to whom the memory of Richard Cobden is the memory of a greatness, not only beyond question and almost beyond rivalry, but of a wholly original kind—a greatness which, while it filled a vast chasm in political philosophy, was rich in a new promise and possibilities hitherto unimagined for the happiness of mankind, and which, at the same time, neither was nor is generally appreciated or understood—to see that his name appears in history, not under the light of a fictitious and common-place distinction, but in its own peculiar and enduring lustre, and takes its appropriate place in the hearts and in the minds of men.

  In 1835 he published his first pamphlet, entitled “England, Ireland and America, by a Manchester Manufacturer.” It attracted great attention, and ran rapidly through several editions. It was marked by a breadth and boldness of views on political and social questions which betokened an original mind. In this production Cobden advocated the same principles of peace, non-intervention, retrenchment, and free trade to which he continued faithful to the last day of his life…. His abhorrence of war amounted to a passion. Throughout his long labours in behalf of unrestricted commerce he never lost sight of this, as being the most precious result of the work in which he was engaged,—its tendency to diminish the hazards of war and to bring the nations of the world into closer and more lasting relations of peace and friendship with each other. He was not deterred by the fear of ridicule or the reproach of Utopianism from associating himself openly, and with all the ardour of his nature, with the peace party in England…. It has already been remarked that Cobden’s efforts in furtherance of free trade were always subordinated to the highest moral purposes—the promotion of peace on earth and good-will among men. This was his desire and hope as respects the Commercial Treaty with France. He was therefore deeply disappointed and distressed to find the old feeling of distrust towards our neighbours still actively fomented by the press and some of the leading politicians of the country. He therefore, in 1862, published his pamphlet entitled “The Three Panics,” the object of which was to trace the history and expose the folly of those periodical visitations of alarm, as respects the designs of our neighbours with which this country had been afflicted for the preceding fifteen or sixteen years.

  Cobden believed that the real interests, of the individual, of the nation, and of all nations are identical; and that these several interests are all in entire and necessary accord with the highest interests of morality. With this belief, an economic truth acquired with him the dignity and vitality of a moral law, and, instead of remaining a barren doctrine of the intellect, became a living force, to move the hearts and consciences of men.

  Cobden made his way to men’s hearts by the union they saw in him of simplicity, earnestness, and conviction, with a singular facility of exposition. This facility consisted in a remarkable power of apt and homely illustration, and a curious ingenuity, in framing the argument that happened to be wanting. Besides his skill in thus hitting on the right argument, Cobden had the oratorical art of presenting it in the way that made its admission to the understanding of a listener easy and undenied…. He always seemed to have made the right allowance for the difficulty with which men follow a speech, as compared with the ease of following the same argument on a printed page…. Then men are attracted by his mental alacrity, by the same readiness with which he turned round to grapple with a new objection. Prompt and confident, he was never at a loss, and he never hesitated. This is what Mr. Disraeli meant when he spoke of Cobden’s sauciness.

  The man whose name is and always will be by far the most celebrated among the apostles of Free Trade.

  His radicalism from the first was the radicalism of a class, and such in all essentials it remained to the end. His lack of the historic sense was not compensated by any great scientific or speculative power. Much as he saw to disapprove of in the existing condition of England, he never framed a large and consistent theory of the methods by which it was to be improved. Outside the narrow bounds of the economics of trade he had political projects, but no coherent political system; so that if he was too theoretical to make a good minister of state, he was too fragmentary and inconsistent to make a really important theorist.

  He had a mastery over every part of the great Free Trade controversy, such as no other could pretend to; and in the number of speeches which he made on this one subject he showed a boundless fertility of illustration, and an inexhaustible ingenuity in varying the arrangement and the form of his arguments. He succeeded in fighting and winning the battle of Free Trade almost against hope. Time vindicated his principles, and his merits and services were ultimately acknowledged even by his opponents.

  Cobden was one of those noble men whose whole thoughts and work and life are devoted to the welfare of their fellow-creatures, and especially to the welfare of the largest and least prosperous classes among them; but who, at the same time, pursue those objects without fawning, fear or flattery, and who care little for the momentary favour of the people they most desire to serve. In the great Corn Law struggle his first and most eager desire was to carry the working classes with him in working out their own salvation; and it was, as he has told us, only when they rejected the object he thought all-important, in favour of the points of the Charter, that he and his friends were compelled to turn to the middle class for support, and to make the agitation a middle-class struggle. In all his subsequent efforts for Education, for Free Trade, and for Peace, it was the welfare of the working classes which lay nearest to his heart—and whether they agreed with him or not, this was the object which he steadily pursued. Peace, above all things: Peace, which is the best friend of industry, was his one great object—an object so overwhelmingly important that he perhaps sometimes allowed it to obscure the actual conditions of imperfect human nature.

  “Hurrah! hurrah! the Corn Bill is law, and now my work is done.” So wrote Richard Cobden to his wife just fifty years ago: on the 26th of June, 1846. It is perhaps fortunate for the earnest and sanguine champion of the Manchester school that he did not live long enough to take part in the chastened festivities with which a few of his followers have endeavored to celebrate the “jubilee” of Peel’s great measure of fiscal revolution. Assuredly if his work was done in 1846, he would have been forced to acknowledge that a good deal of it has been undone by 1896. Indeed, as the Cobdenite jubilators have sadly to admit, the time is one singularly unpropitious for rejoicing on their part…. It is possible that if Cobden were alive to-day, and face to face with the conditions of latter-day industrialism and international competition, he might be a Cobdenite no longer. It is certain that so acute an explorer of the currents of public opinion would have perceived that such projects as that of an Imperial Customs Union would have to be dealt with on their merits, political and social, as well as financial. And he would have understood that they could not be disposed of by being called “veiled Protectionism,” or by an appeal to an economic pontificate that has lost its sanctity.