Chapter XXXIV.: the american war—fortification schemes—international law.

In one of his last letters before leaving Algiers, Cobden had written to Mr. Hargreaves in rather a depressed vein. “The truth must be told,” he said, “though one does not like publicly to shelve oneself—my work is nearly done. I am nearly fifty-seven and not, like you, of a long-lived family. Since I passed my meridian a few years ago, I have found my powers sensibly waning and particularly those organs of the voice which I exercised so rudely whilst in their prime, and which were naturally but a weak inheritance from my father. If, however, I could pass the remainder of my days with only the labour of an average person of my years, I could, I dare say, nurse myself into a good old age. The question is whether I ought rather to content myself with a briefer span and the satisfaction of trying to do something a little beyond my strength? It is a nice question for casuists, for the home duties affecting one’s young children intrude.”

When Cobden returned to England his public position had more than recovered the authority and renown which had been seriously impaired by his unpopular attitude on the Russian War, and his devotion to the thankless questions of Retrenchment and Peace. It was felt that the reproach of sentimental statesmanship could not well be applied to a man who had conducted so tough and laborious an undertak ing as the negotiation of a tariff. The commercial class were compelled to forgive what they called his crotchets, to one who had opened for them new channels of wealth. The Lord Mayor entertained him at a banquet. In the House of Commons he received a hearty welcome, but a short speech on the repeal of the paper duty was his only contribution to its proceedings before the end of the session. He had never even in the darkest times lost the ear of this assembly. It seldom refuses to listen to anybody who can furnish it in moderately few words with aptly chosen fact, or substantial and unsophisticated argument. Everybody understood that neither he nor Mr. Bright took up a question for the sake of having a question. Their subjects were put into their minds by actual circumstances from without. Their habit, as I think that Cobden himself said, was only to step out and join the debate when they saw that it was passing their door. It was always known that whenever Cobden spoke, he really sought to have something done or left undone. A speech with him was a means of accomplishing something, and always referred to practical performance of some kind. “You know gentlemen, I never perorate.” he sometimes said to great meetings of his constituents, “and when I have done, I have off, and sit down.” This abstinence was in itself an enormous recommendation. Then as a debater, so fine a judge as Mr. Disraeli pronounced Cobden to have few equals; as a logician, he described him as close and compact, adroit, acute, and even subtle. Even the politicians who most disliked what one of them called Boanerges-Liberalism, found nothing to offend them in a man who was never either declamatory or passionate; and who never lost sight of the sympathies of those whom he addressed.

Before the year was over, events came to pass which once more brought Cobden, and perhaps in a still greater degree Mr. Bright, into an almost angrier conflict than before with the same classes and interests with whom they had been in strife from the first. The great civil war broke out between the Northern and the Southern states of the American Union. England, according to its peculiar custom, was quickly divided into two vehemently opposed camps. Once more Cobden found himself in antagonism to Lord Palmerston, Lord Russell, the Times newspaper, and all the other representatives of the aristocratic classes, and those who imitate and feel with these classes.

As his correspondence shows, Cobden did not at first seize the true significance of the struggle. There were reasons why he should be slow to take the side of the North. One of them was that he could not for a time bear to face the prospect that the community which had hitherto been the realization on so great a scale of his pacific ideals, should after all plunge into war just as a monarchy or an oligarchy might have done. The North, by refusing to allow the South to secede, seemed to him at first to be the author of the strife. Another reason why his sympathies wavered was that though the Southerners were slaveholders, their interests made them Free Traders. As we have seen more than once, Cobden was always prone to be led by his sympathies as an economist. The hesitation, however, did not last long. He tolerably soon came round to a more correct view of the issues at stake, partly under the influence of Mr. Bright, whose sagacity, sharpened by his religious hatred of slavery, at once perceived that a break-up of the American Union would be a damaging blow to the cause of freedom all over the world. At the beginning of the struggle, they happened to meet Mr. Motley at breakfast. With a good deal of liveliness Cobden attacked something which Mr. Motley had been writing in the newspapers in favour of the Northern case. As they walked away down Piccadilly together, Mr. Bright remonstrated with Cobden on these symptoms of a leaning towards the South. The argument was continued and renewed as other arguments had been between them. The time came for Cobden to address his constituents at Rochadale. “Now,” said Mr. Bright, with a final push of insistence, “this is the moment for you to speak with a clear voice.” Cobden’s vision by this time was no longer disturbed by economic or other prepossessions, and he was henceforth as generally identified as Mr. Bright with Support of the Northern cause.

The interest in the conflict soon took a practical turn. The circumstances of the war very speedily raised great questions connected with the maritime rights of belligerents and neutrals, and Cobden threw himself energetically into a discussion which was to vital importance to Great Britain. His activity between the date of the Commercial Treaty and the time of his death was principally directed to two objects; the improvement of international law as it affects commerce in time of war, and the limitation of expenditure upon unneeded schemes of national defence. The first and more important of these subjects had been brought into a conspicuous place for public discussion by the Declaration of Paris in 1856. Free ships were then declared to make free goods. The merchants of a nation in a state of war were to be free to carry on their trade as usual, provided that they should send their goods in the ships of neutral Powers. Cobden carried this favour to neutrals a great deal Further, and he explained his position in a carefully reasoned letter to Mr. Ashworth, then the Chairman of the Manchester Chamber of Commerce (April 10, 1862). Not only, he contended ought all private property, that of enemies no less than that of neutrals, to be exempt from capture at sea, but neutral ships ought to be exempt from right of visitation and search, and, most important of all, the commercial ports of an enemy ought to be exempt from blockade. Cobden’s defence of this transformation of what he called the old barbarous code of international maritime law, rested not merely on the claims of natural justice, but on the special requirements of our own country. A population circumstanced as ours is in respect both of its food and of the raw materials of its industry, is interested beyond all others in removing every regulation which interferes with the free circulation of the necessaries of life, whether in time of peace or war. Why should we persist, he asked, in upholding a belligerent right which we have always shrunk from enforcing, and shall never rigorously apply, by which we place in the hands of other belligerents the power at any moment of depriving a large part of our population of the supply of the raw materials of their industry and of the necessaries of life? The Cotton Famine in Lancashire, caused by the blockade of the Southern ports of the United States, gave to these views a painful appositeness, and Cobden pressed the arguments of his letter to Mr. Ashworth still more forcibly and with a greater breadth of illustration in an address to the Manchester Chamber of Commerce in the autumn of the same year.

In the course of 1862 Cobden made one of his most determined and systematic onslaughts upon Lord Palmerston’s policy of national defence. He carried on very effective skirmishing during the session, until at the close of it (Aug. 1), as an eye-witness describes it, they engaged in a regular single combat. The House was thin, the conclusion was foregone, and no effect followed from Cobden’s undaunted perseverance. Perhaps more was done by a pamphlet which he published earlier in the same year, The Three Panics, a strenuous and humiliating narrative of the incoherent alarms of invasion which had seized successive Governments in 1848, in 1853, and in 1862. Mr. Gladstone thought that the narrative laid more than the full share of blame upon Governments and Parliament, and that it was unjust to let the general public go scot-free. He told Cobden a story of a large farmer whom he had canvassed in the general election of 1857. He exclaimed to the farmer against the amount of the military and naval charges. “Well, sir,” the voter said, “we want to be defended;” and no impression was to be made upon him. In truth, as Mr. Gladstone put it, there was a residuum of excitement standing over from the Russian war which had nourished all the subsequent alarm. Nor was it to be denied, either, that the world had become more volcanic since the days to which Cobden referred. It was in vain that he quoted Peel’s excellent practical maxim, that in time of peace “you must consent to incur some risk” (see above, p. 71). There was one risk which statesmen and the public saw closer at hand, and which they were bent on not incurring if they could help it, and that was risk from the possible necessities of the French Emperor. On the special issues, therefore, between himself and Lord Palmerston, such as the Fortification Scheme, Cobden made little way in opinion. What he did was certainly to moderate what Mr. Gladstone called “the spirit of expenditure,” and this according to him was more objectionable and more dangerous than the expenditure itself.

He deplored the absence from the scene of his steadfast ally, but Mr. Bright remained at Rochdale. He told Cobden how he admired his courage and perseverance, but he could not imitate it. For the moment he acknowledged himself beaten. The fates were against them in the shape of the ignorance and flunkeyism of the middle classes. After the final battle in August, Mr. Bright wrote to him that he had maintained the struggle most manfully. “I have never,” he said, “read speeches with more pleasure than these in which you have attempted to destroy the most shameless imposture of our time. But speeches will hardly do it. Since 1854 the public have been so thoroughly demoralized that they have become literally helpless, and I can scarcely conceive of an event sufficiently insulting and alarming to them to excite them to any positive and united action. The working men have no leaders of their own class, and they have no faith in any others. I wait, therefore, for some accident to bring about a change. Possibly Palmerston’s final fall, which cannot be long postponed, may act as an awakener throughout the country. Still I think your speeches are preparing the way for some discoveries on the part of our dim-seeing people.” This prophecy was fulfilled to the letter. Liberalism remained stationary until Lord Palmerston’s death, and it was not long after that event that the great awakening took place which landed Mr. Gladstone in power, with Mr. Bright himself for the most popular and influential of his colleagues.

Cobden’s correspondence during these final years touches other topics, but the fortunes of the war in America, international maritime law, and national expenditure, were the subjects which now filled the largest space both in his thoughts and in his public addresses.