Chapter XXXV.: correspondence with mr. delane.

It was inevitable that a public man, working for a transformation of political opinion, should incur the hostility of the great newspaper of the day, for the simple reason that it has always been the avowed principle of the conductors of that newspaper to keep very close to the political opinion of the country in its unregenerate state. This principle it is not our business here to discuss, but we can easily perceive how it would come to make the newspaper sincerely inimical to the Manchester school. We need not resort to private grudges to explain what is perfectly intelligible without them.

“I remember,” said Cobden, in his speech on behalf of Mr. Bright at Manchester in 1857, “the first time I spoke in public after returning home from the Continent in 1847. It was at a dinner-party in Manchester at which I took the chair; and I took the opportunity of launching this question of the press, and saying that the newspaper press of England was not free, and that this was a thing which the reformers of the country ought to set about—to emancipate it. Well, I got a most vicious article next day from the Times newspaper for that, and the Times has followed us both with a very ample store of venom ever since.” “Any man,” he said on the same occasion, “who has lived in public life, as I have, must know that it is quite useless to contradict any falsehood or calumny, because it comes up again next day just as rife as ever. There is the Times newspaper always ready to repeat it, and the grosser the better.” “My plan,” he wrote to a friend in 1861, “has always been to meet that journal with a bold front, and neither to give nor to take quarter. I may add that if ever I have succeeded in any public proceedings, it has always been in spite of the opposition of that print. It was so with the League; with the abolition of the Taxes on Knowledge; and with the French Treaty. You may take my word for it, you never can be in the path for success, in any great measure of policy, unless you are in opposition to that journal.”

It as very easy to see the reason why all this should be as it was. In 1850 Cobden told Mr. John Cassell that he believed the newspaper stamp to be the greatest grievance that the democracy had in the whole list of fiscal exactions. “So long as the penny lasts, there can be no daily press for the middle or working class. Who below the rank of a merchant or wholesale dealer can afford to take in a daily paper at fivepence? Clearly it is beyond the reach of the mechanic and the shopkeeper. The result is that the daily press is written for its customers—the aristocracy, the millionaires, and the clubs and news rooms. The great public cannot have its organs of the daily press, because it cannot afford to pay for them. The dissenters have no daily organ for the same reason. The governing class in this country will resist the removal of the penny stamp, not on account of the loss of revenue (that is no obstacle with a surplus of two or three millions), but because they know that the stamp makes the daily press the instrument and servant of the oligarchy.”

His correspondence shows with how sharp an eye Cobden watched his masked foe. He jealously noted any post that was conferred on a writer in the Times; in this respect, I am bound to confess, being rather apt to make mountains out of extremely small molehills. He told his friends in scornful tones of the social deference that was paid in private by great people to the famous editor, and was scandalized, here also rather unreasonably, to find him dinning at tables where every guest but himself was an ambassador, a cabinet minister, or a bishop. An eminent visitor from the United States, who had access to London society, was for a long time perplexed by the social attentions that were bestowed on this mysterious being, and in conversation with Cobden contrasted the position of the press and its conductors in England with that of similar personages in his own country. “In America,” said Cobden, referring to this in a letter to Mr. Hargreaves, “the editor or proprietor puts his name on the front of his paper, fights the battles of his party openly, shares in the honours of its victories, and is to be found among the senators, the governors of states, etc. But with us the conductor of the Times preserves a strict incognito to his readers, on the plea that anonymous writing is necessary for preserving his independence, whilst he inconsistently drops the mask in the presence of those who dispense social distinctions and dispose of government patronage—the very persons towards whom in the interests of the public he ought to preserve his independence.”

In November, 1863, it happened that in his annual address to his constituents, Cobden made a passing reference to the land question, and Mr. Bright followed with more on the same subject. The Times promptly accused the two Gracchi of Rochdale of exciting discontent among the poor, and proposing a spoliation of the owners of land. The rest of the story is worth telling, if for no other reason, because it illustrates the kind of opinion which public writers could at that time pretend seriously to hold about these two statesmen.

By accident Cobden saw the misrepresentation of which his enemy had been guilty, and he at once wrote the following letter to the editor of the Times:—

Sir,—The following is extracted from your yesterday’s leading article:—

“Then, though a small state may have something to lose by change, it has usually more to gain; and so it comes to pass that it looks upon any attempt to reconstruct the map, or reform the institutions of Europe, with something of that satisfaction with which the poor might regard Mr. Bright’s proposition for a division among them of the lands of the rich, or the Roman plebeians might hang on the lips of Gracchus when he rose to expound to them his last plan for a new colony, with large grants of land to every citizen who should join it.”

Without communicating with Mr. Bright, I trouble you with a few words on this gross literary outrage, which concerns not him alone, but every public man. To utter a syllable to prove that the above assertion, that Mr. Bright advocated a division of the lands of the rich among the poor, is a groundless and gratuitous falsehood, would be to offer an insult to one who has done more than probably any other public man, to popularize those economical truths on which the rights of property are based. To say that it is a foul libel for which the publisher is amenable to law were beside the question, because the object of the calumny would scorn any other court of appeal than that of public opinion. But a wider question is forced on our attention by this specimen of your too habitual mode of dealing, not merely with individuals, but with the interests of society. A tone of pre-eminent unscrupulousness in the discussion of political questions, a contempt for the rights and feelings of others, and a shameless disregard of the claims of consistency and sincerity on the part of its writers, have long been recognized as the distinguishing characteristics of the Times, and placed it in marked contrast with the rest of the periodical press, including the penny journals of the metropolis and the provinces. Its writers are, I believe, betrayed into this tone mainly by their reliance on the shield of an impenetrable secrecy. No gentleman would dream of saying, under the responsibility of his signature, what your writer said of Mr. Bright yesterday. I will not stop to remark on the deterioration of character which follows when a man of education and rare Ability thus lowers himself—ay, even in his own eyes—to a condition of moral cowardice; for will he deny that if he were to meet Mr. Bright in the club, or the House of Commons, with the knowledge that his secret was divulged, he would cower with conscious inferiority before the man he had stabbed in the dark? This, however, is his own affair. But there is another aspect of the subject in which the public is directly interested.

In the present management of the Times thee is an essential departure from the plan on which it was conducted twenty or thirty years ago, which distinguishes it from all other journals. They who associate in the higher political circles of the metropolis know that the chief editor and the manager of the Times, while still maintaining a strict incognito towards the public, drops the mask with very sufficient reasons in the presence of those powerful classes who are at once the dispensers of social distinction, and (on which I might have something to say) of the patronage of the Government. We all know the man whose fortune is derived from the Times; we know its manager; its only avowed and responsible editor—he of the semi-official correspondence with Sir Charles Napier in the Baltic—through whose hands, though he never pen a line himself, every slander in its leaders must pass—is as well known to us as the chief official at the Home Office. Now the question is forced on us, whether we who are behind the scenes are not bound, in the interests of the uninitiated public, and as the only certain mode of abating such outrages as this, to lift the veil and dispel the illusion by which the Times is enabled to pursue this game of secrecy to the public, and servility to the Government—a game (I purposely use the word) which secures for its connexions the corrupt advantages, while denying to the public its own boasted benefits of the anonymous system.

It will be well for public men to decide, each in his own case (for myself I have no doubt on the subject), whether, in response to such attacks as these, they will continue to treat the Times as an impersonal myth; or whether on the contrary, they will in future summon the responsible editor, manager, or proprietor to the bar of public opinion, and hold him up by name to the obloquy which awaits the traducer and the calumniator in every other walk of social and political life.

I am, &c.,

This letter was not inserted in the Times, and the Editor wrote to Cobden a reply, of which the following is the substance:—

The Editor of the Times presents his compliments to Mr. Cobden, and encloses a proof of his letter, which, though it arrived by Saturday’s post, only reached the Editor’s hands last evening. He could not then give it immediate consideration, but, in deference to Mr. Cobden’s name, he announced that it should be published to-morrow.

On reading it, however, this morning, he thinks—and he trusts Mr. Cobden will, on re-perusal, agree with him—that Mr. Cobden has no right to expect him, upon a pretext entirely irrelevant, to publish a series of most offensive and unfounded imputations upon himself and his friends.

.... The facts, however, are shortly these:—Messrs. Cobden and Bright make two speeches at Rochdale, which are reported in the Times at unusual length, and with extraordinary promptitude. These speeches are discussed elaborately in two leading articles on successive days, and in each of them certain passage are interpreted as recommending a repartition of the land among the poor. Messrs. Cobden and Bright are expressly challenged to disavow this interpretation if it misrepresents their meanings; but they make no reply, and apparently accept it as conveying their true intention.

The speeches, as reported, also remain before the public for upwards of a week, and the interpretation put upon them by the Times provokes no adverse remark. At last an article appears upon a totally different subject, in which an allusion is made in a single phrase to Mr. Bright’s supposed opinions, and Mr. Cobden pounces upon this phrase, not that he may discuss the true interpretation of Mr. Bright’s expressions, but that he may make a vague and most offensive attack upon the Times and its conductors.

The Editor declines to permit the Times to be made the means of disseminating imputations which he knows to be unfounded, and which are entirely irrelevant to the question at issue.

The sensation was tremendous in Fleet Street and Pall Mall, when Cobden published his rejoinder, not to the impersonal Editor, but to Mr. Delane in his own proper name.