To John T. Delane, Esq.

Sir—You and I have been long personally acquainted; your handwriting is known to me, and I know you to be the chief Editor of the Times. Under such circumstances I cannot allow you to Suppress your individuality, and shield yourself under third person of the editorial nominative, in a correspondence affecting your personal responsibility for a scandalous aspersion on myself (as I now learn for the first time from you) as well as on Mr. Bright.

Your refusal to publish my former letter is a matter so entirely within your own province, that I have nothing to say upon it, except to congratulate myself on the recent revolution in the newspaper world, which renders your decision comparatively harmless. A few years ago the times possessed almost a monopoly of publicity. Four-fifths of the daily newspaper circulation issued from its press. Now it constitutes, probably, one-tenth of our diurnal journalism, and my letter will be only the more generally read from having been excluded from your columns.

But your letter proceeds of offer some most singular arguments in justification of your attack on Mr. Bright. You state that your journal had previously contained two leading articles, casting the same imputation both on him and myself, that you had challenged us to disavow your interpretation of our speeches, and as we had failed to do so, you accepted our silence as an acknowledgment of the truth of your interpretation,—in other words, as proof our guilt! Here we have, in a compendious form, an exhibition of those qualities which characterize the editorial management of the Times,—of that arrogant self-complacency, logical incoherence, and moral bewilderment, which a too long career of impunity and irresponsibility could alone engender.

Now that which lies at the basis of this reasoning, if such it may be termed, is an inordinate display of what I must call Times egotism. Notwithstanding that your journal has now but a fractional part of the daily newspaper circulation, you complacently assume that all the world are your constant readers. The Times never enters my house, except by rare accident. This I know to be also the case with Mr. Bright, who will, in all probability, never have seen your attack until he reads it in my letter. It is only during the Session, at the Club, that I am in the habit of seeing your paper. The chance visit of a friend last Friday placed in my hand the Times of the previous day, when that scandalous paragraph caught my eye which formed the text of my letter to you. I was entirely ignorant of the two former attacks, which, by a droll process of reasoning, you now invite me to accept as a justification of the third. Now, let me ask you to descend for a minute from your editorial chair, while I illustrate this logic by a hypothetical case put to Mr. Delane, the barrister. Suppose that the constituents of Mr. Bright were to indict your publisher for defaming their member, and that it was proposed in a consultation of lawyers, at which you were present, to set up as a plea of justification at the trial that the same libel had been twice previously published against both Mr. Bright and Mr. Cobden,—would it fail to occur to you that, in the eyes of an honest judge and jury, this defence would be considered an aggravation of the offence?

But we will assume, for the sake of argument, that Mr. Bright and I are regular subscribers to, and diligent readers of, your newspaper. Is it seriously contended that as often as you choose to pervert the sense of our speeches, and charge us with schemes of public robbery, the onus lies with us to disprove the imputation, and that neglecting to do so, we have no right to complain if we are thenceforth treated as felons? Would it not occur to any one but an editor of the Times that, before we violate the ninth commandment, the obligation lies with us to know that we are not bringing a false accusation against our neighbour?

Now, a word upon the subject which has given rise to this correspondence. Nobody knows better than yourself, except the writer who actually penned the scandalous passage in question, that this charge of wishing to divide the land of the rich among the poor, when levelled at Mr. Bright, is nothing but the resort to a stale rhetorical trick (though the character of the libel is not on that account altered) to draw away public attention from the real issue, and thus escape from the discussion of a serious, but, for the moment, an inconvenient public topic. In order to trail a red herring across the true scent the cry of spoliation was raised. You and your writers cannot be ignorant that the laws and political institutions of this country tend to promote the agglomeration of agricultural land in a constantly lessening number of hands:—you and I know, by a joint experience, which neither of us is likely to have forgotten, how great are the obstacles which the law interposes to the free transfer of landed property in this country. Now, the policy which sustains this state of things is a public question, which is not only fairly open to discussion, but invites the earnest attention and study of public men. In this, as in every other human concern, we must bring the matter to the test of experience, and in no way can this be more effectually done than by a comparison between the condition of the great majority of the agricultural population in this and other countries. The subject of our land laws has engaged the attention of eminent statesmen, and of our highest legal authorities; but I will venture to add—and it is all I shall condescend to say in refutation of your aspersions—that if there are two persons, who beyond all others, have given pledges throughout an ardent discussion of kindred topics during a quarter of a century, that in debating the question of the tenure and transfer of land they would observe the restraints of law, justice, and political economy, they are the men whom your journal has dared to charge with the advocacy of a scheme for robbing the landowners of their property for the benefit of the poor.

Judging from past experience, this intrusion of a gross personality will tend only to attract public notice to a matter which it was meant to put out of sight. It has been the fate of the Times to help forward every cause it has opposed. By its truculent, I had almost said ruffianly, attacks on every movement while in the weakness of infancy, it has roused to increased efforts the energies of those it has assailed; while, at the same time, it has awakened the attention of a languid public, and attracted the sympathy of fair and manly minds. It is thus that such public measures as the abolition of the Corn Laws, the repeal of the Taxes on Knowledge, and the negotiation of the Treaty of Commerce with France, triumphed in spite of its virulent, pertinacious, and unscrupulous opposition; until, at last, I am tending to the conviction that there are three conditions only, requisite for the success of any great project of reform,—namely, a good cause, persevering advocates, and the hostility of the Times.

I shall forward this correspondence for publication in the Rochdale Observer, that it may at least be perused by the community which has the greatest interest in a controversy which concerns the reputation of Mr. Bright and myself.

I am, sir, your obedient servant,

To this Mr. Delane replied (Dec. 11) that it was quite true that they had long been personally acquainted; that there was no need to identify his handwriting; and that he had no desire to deny his personal responsibility for what Cobden was pleased to call his “scandalous aspersions.” Proceeding to vindicate himself, Mr. Delane asked whether it was egotistic or unreasonable to suppose that one who had pounced so promptly upon a single phrase in an article of much inferior interest to himself, should have read the articles which discussed his own speech? Could he be expected to know that a gentleman who once preferred a single copy of the Times “to all the books of Thucydides” did not admit the Times to his house? The pith of the vindication was in the following paragraph:—

You attribute to the Times a deliberate misrepresentation of your mean ing and that of Mr. Bright, as to the means of amending the unequal distribution of land between the rich and the poor. I repeat that certain passages in your speeches will, in my opinion, bear no other interpretation than that ascribed to them. If you merely intended to recommend measures for facilitating the conveyance of land, as your reference to our transaction at Ascot would suggest, your language was the most strangely exaggerated that was ever used to further a humble instalment of law reform. If you had read the Times, instead of condemning it unread, you would have known that it has always advocated the simplification of means for the transfer of land, and that its advocacy has not been altogether unsuccessful. But just as no simplification of conveyances will compel the rich to sell land or enable the poor to buy it, so no legislative measure will render the purchase of land a profitable investment for the poor.

The possession, the transfer, and the tenure of land are, however, public questions, which are best discussed, not between Mr. Cobden and Mr. Delane, but as it has always been the practice of the English press to discuss them—anonymously. That practice was not invented by me; it will not be destroyed by yourself. It has approved itself to the judgment of all, whether statesmen or publicists, who have appreciated the freedom and independence of the press; and I believe it to be essential to the interests not only of the press, but of the public.

Cobden, however, insisted on carrying on the controversy with Mr. Delane:—

Sir,—I have received the letter dated from your private residence, and bearing your own signature, in which you take on yourself personally the responsibility of the interpretation put by the Times on the speeches of Mr. Bright and myself at Rochdale—namely, that we proposed “a division among the poor of the lands of the rich.” Your letter to me says:—

“You attribute to the Times a deliberate misrepresentation of your meaning, and that of Mr. Bright, as to the means of amending the unequal distribution of the land between the rich and the poor. I repeat that certain passages in your speeches will, in my opinion, bear no other interpretation than that ascribed to them.”

This is a grave accusation. I am told that, if proved, it would bring Mr. Bright and myself within the provisions of the Act 57th Geo. III. cap. 19, and render us liable to the penal consequences of transportation for seven years.

I will not believe that you can be so wanting in the respect due to others, as well as yourself, as to have addressed this accusation to me, unless with the belief that you have evidence to substantiate it.

I call on you to give me those “certain passages” to which you refer, and which are really now the only question at issue between you and me. That there may be no excuse or ground for delay, I accept the report which appeared in your paper as an accurate version of my speech; and to aid you in your task I have cut from the Times the entire passage which contains all that I said in reference to the condition of the people generally, or to the agricultural population, and the land question in particular. But let it be distinctly understood that I do not confine you to this extract, but that I give you the entire range of my speech.

Before giving the passage I will say a few words, which, although I do not in the slightest degree claim for them the character of evidence, may have interest in some quarters.

It is known that I am not in the habit of writing a word beforehand of what I speak in public. Like other speakers, practice has given me as perfect self-possession in the presence of an audience as if I were writing in my closet. Now, my ever-constant and overruling thought while addressing a public meeting, the one necessity which long experience of the arts of controversialists has impressed on my mind, is to avoid the possibility of being misrepresented, and prevent my opponents from raising a false issue—a trick of logic as old as the time of Aristotle. If I have, as some favourable critics are pleased to think, sometimes spoken with clearness, it is more owing to this ever-present fear of misrepresentation than any other cause:—it is thus that the most noxious things in life may have their uses. When in my speech at Rochdale I came to touch upon the subject of the land, the thought instantly flashed upon me—and none but the public speaker knows with what velocity thoughts move when in the presence of 4000 listeners—that I was dealing with a question about which there is a superstition in England, unknown elsewhere, and that the enemy would raise the cry of agrarianism against me, and hence my denunciation of agrarian outrage, which will be found in the following extract. Had I been inspired with the faculty of second-sight, and seen the Editor of the Times sitting bodily penning his criticism on my speech, I could not have more completely refuted and confounded in anticipation the charge now brought against me.

The following is the passage referred to:—

“It has been a fashion of late to talk of an extension of the franchise as something not to be tolerated, because it is assumed that the mass of the community are not fitted to take a part in government, and people point to America and France, and other countries, and draw comparisons between this country and other countries. Now, I hope I shall not be considered revolutionary, because at my age I don’t want any revolutions They won’t serve me, I am sure, or anybody that belongs to me. England may compare very favourably with most other countries if you draw the line in society tolerably high; and if you compare the condition of the rich and the upper classes of England, or a considerable portion of the middle classes, with the same classes abroad. I don’t think a rich man, barring the climate, which is not very good, could be very much happier anywhere else than in England; but when my opponents treat this question of the franchise as one that threatens to bring the masses of the people down from their present state to the level of other nations, I say that I have travelled in most civilized countries, and that the masses of my fellow-countrymen do not compare so favourably with the masses of other countries as I could wish. I find in other countries a greater proportion of people owing property than there are in England. I don’t know a protestant community in the world where the masses of the people are so illiterate as in England. These are not bad tests of the condition of a people. It is no use your talking of your army and navy, your exports and your imports—it is no use telling me you have a small potion of your people exceedingly well off. I want to bring the test to a comparison of the majority of the people with the majority of the people in other countries. Now, I say with regard to some things in foreign countries we don’t compare favourably. The condition of the English peasantry has no parallel on the face of the earth. (Hear.) You have no other peasantry but that of England which is entirely divorced from the land. There is no other country in the world where you will not find men holding the plough and turning up the furrow upon their own freehold. I don’t want any agrarian outrages by which we should change all this, but this I find, and it is quite consistent with human nature, that wherever I go the condition of the people is generally pretty good, in comparison with the power they have to take care of themselves; and if you have a class entirely destitute of political power, while in another country they possess it, they will be treated there with more consideration, they will have greater advantages, they will be better educated, and have a better chance of possessing property than in a country where they are deprived of political power. (Hear.)

You will observe in the above passage from my speech, taken from your own report, that I use the words, “I don’t want any agrarian outrages by which we should change all this;” and now we must appeal to the authority of the lexicographer. If you turn to Webster’s (quarto) Dictionary you will find the word “agrarian” interpreted, on the authority of Burke, as follows:—

“Relating to lands. Denoting or pertaining to an equal division of lands; as, the agrarian laws of Rome, which distributed the conquered and other public lands equally among all the citizens, limiting the quantity which each might enjoy.” Again, in the same dictionary the word “agrarianism” is given as an equal division of lands or property, or the principles of those who favour such a division.”

Thus, in repudiating the agrarian system, I repudiated, in pure and unquestionable English, according to Burke, the principles of those who favour an equal division of land; I repudiated the agrarian laws of Rome; and yet, in spite of this, you charge me and Mr. Bright with “proposing a division among the poor of the lands of the rich,” and you associate us with Gracchus in schemes of socialistic spoliation.

Mr. Delane in reply (Dec. 16) insisted that the passage to which Cobden had referred him, did in his opinion convey a proposition for the division among the poor of the lands of the rich. “You seem to assume,” he said, “that I charged you with proposing that this division should be accomplished by violence. But your own words were there to prove to me that such was not your meaning, and to confute me instantly if I had attempted to attach that meaning to it.” This, as we shall see in a moment, ruined Mr. Delane’s case, for the Times had distinctly and in terms described the proposed change as the work of violence. Meanwhile, he went on to say that it could be effected by compulsory partition after death as in France:—

A similar measure proposed by yourself, or by Mr. Bright, and carried in a parliament elected principally by the peasantry whom you desire to enfranchise, because they would then “have a better chance of having property,” would in two or three generations not only check the accumulation of land in few hands, but would break up all existing estates, great or small, and thus largely increase the number of proprietors. In another generation, probably, the peasant himself would “turn up the furrow on his own freehold,” and be no longer “divorced from the land.”

You suggest so obviously that it is by legislative measures—rendered possible by giving political power to the peasantry—you propose to “amend the unequal distribution of the land between the “rich and the poor,” that no one would think of charging you with endeavouring to effect this great change by violence.

It was Clear that Mr. Delane had now surrendered himself into the hands of his adversary. Cobden did not allow him to escape. “For the first time,” he replied (Dec. 18), “you now disavow having imputed to Mr. Bright and myself the design of promoting by violent, illegal, or immoral means a redistribution of the land of this country.” Grammar, logic, and common sense, he said, all revolted against the Editor’s attempt to show the connexion between his former language and his new accusation.

You now profess only to impute to us the design of favouring the equal division of landed property among all the children at the death of a proprietor. But this will not correspond with your reiterated charge that we contemplated a division “among the poor of the land of the rich.” What you now affect to consider to be our object is the division of the land of the rich equally among the children of the rich. I must bring the question to the test of your own language.

In your leading article of December 3, you alleged that the small states of the continent regarded a congress with the “satisfaction with which the poor might regard Mr. Bright’s proposition for dividing among them the lands of the rich.” I now infer, from your new interpretation, that I am asked to construe this a meaning only the satisfaction with which the children of rich landowners would regard a proposition for dividing among them the lands of their fathers.

Again, in your letter to me of December 7 you stated “These speeches are discussed elaborately in two leading articles on successive days, and in each of them certain passages are interpreted as recommending a repartition of the land among the poor.” Now, the word partition or repartition means simply a division, and not a bequest or inheritance, and yet, with our dictionaries at hand, you now ask me to interpret the “repartition of the land among the poor,” as only meaning that Mr. Bright and I wished to compel rich landowners at their death to leave their estates equally among all their children. And in your letter to me of December 11 you “repeat” the assertion that “certain passages” of our speeches “bear no other interpretation than that ascribed to them.” Now up to that date you had put no other interpretation on those speeches than that they advocated the “division of the land of the rich among the poor.” The poor we are now told to interpret to mean only the children of rich landowners!

Then, I suppose, we are expected to forget that you coupled us with Gracchus, and the agrarian system of Rome.

No; in the teeth of all these proofs in plain, unmistakable English to the contrary, I should be sacrificing truth to courtesy were I to affect to concur in this new version of your language, which does not admit of two meanings.

This was Sufficiently pungent; but it was not the most decisive blow. On the evening of the day on which he wrote the above letter, Cobden found in the Daily News what it is odd that he should not have sought earlier, namely, a passage from one of the previous articles in the Times to which Mr. Delane had referred. “This language,” the Times had said (Nov. 26), “so often repeated, and so calculated to excite discontent among the poor and half-informed, has really only one intelligible meaning. ‘Reduce the electoral franchise; for when you have done so you will obtain an assembly which will seize on the estates of the proprietors of land, and divide them gratuitously among the poor.’... It may be right to reduce the franchise, but certainly not as a step to spoliation.”

Now, said Cobden, “you will at once perceive that unless this language be unreservedly recalled, it makes the statement in your last letter simply a mockery and an untruth.” Mr. Delane, declaring that the passage taken without its context does not convey the same meaning as when taken with it, and enclosing a copy of the article in full, then begged to retire from the personal part of the contro versy.

There can now be very little difference of opinion among candid men as to the merits of the controversy. It is hardly possible to deny two propositions; first, that the interpretation by the Times of what had been said at Rochdale was plainly unjust, heedless, and calumnious; second, that Mr. Delane’s attempt to explain away the imputation of violence and spoliation was wholly unsuccessful. No editor ever stumbled into a more palpable scrape, nor chose a less fortunate way out of it. The simple and manly course which the Editor of the Times ought to have taken was to say something of this kind:—“My article was written in good faith. It is possible, however, that the writer may have been led by certain conscious or unconscious prepossessions against the speakers to read something in Mr. Bright’s speech and in yours which was not literally there. I now see, looking at the speeches more carefully, that your words could not bear the construction that was put upon them, and that your complaint is justified. I will, as Editor, publicly retract an imputation which I now perceive to have been erroneous.”

As this apology was not forthcoming, Cobden was entirely justified in publicly seizing Mr. Delane by name, and fixing upon him personally the misdemeanour for which he contumaciously made himself answerable. Anonymous journalism may be tolerated and defended on account of certain incidental conveniences—Cobden himself wrote plenty of anonymous articles—but the system cannot be invoked to protect the writer or the conductor of a public print form liability to be called publicly to account in case of persistent and proved misrepresentation. On the other hand, it can hardly be denied that Cobden put himself in the wrong by accusing the conductors of the Times of cor ruption. When he talked of the “corrupt advantages” of servility to the Government, he made an imputation which he could not prove (as he found out when he tried to get up a case for Parliament), and which was in fact not justified. The conductors of the Times did not praise the friends and abuse the enemies of the Government, in order to have one of their contributors sent to the Bahamas, or another made a magistrate at Bow Street. The Times was Palmerstonian because the country was Palmerstonian, just as by-and-by it became Derbyite because the country seemed Derbyite. It condemned the talk of Cobden and Mr. Bright about the land, because the capitalists and the country gentlemen and the great nobles were frightened out of their senses by such talk. The conductor of a newspaper is entirely at liberty to choose what constituency he will attract. It pleased the Times at that day to domesticate itself, it was said, among the aristocracy. This may have been a very narrow and ignoble policy, but Mr. Delane had as much right to prefer to spend his evenings among dukes and bishops as Cobden had to spend his among manufacturers and merchants. One thing he had not a right to do, and that was to fasten upon public men propositions which it was his business to know that they had never made.

That the Times was wrong upon some of the greatest questions of Cobden’s time is quite clear. How wrong it was upon the Russian War, the China War, the American Civil War, everybody knows. But let us be just. If the Times was wrong, so was the country. The newspaper only said what the directing classes of the country said. Cobden’s own letters to his friends show as much as this. The Times was, in fact, the natural exponent of all those old ideas of national policy which Cobden was bent on overthrowing. Just like the Athenian Sophist, the newspaper taught the conventional prejudices of those who paid for it. It is as if, says Socrates of the Sophist and his public, a man had observed the appetites of a great and powerful beast, how to approach it, why it is furious or clam, what tones soothe and what tones irritate it. Like the Sophist, the newspaper reflects the morality, the intelligence, the tone of sentiment, of its public. If the latter is vicious, so is the former.

As it happened, a great organ in the penny press treated Cobden, as he thought, even worse than if its price had been threepence. The Daily Telegraph declined to print Cobden’s letter to Mr. Delane, from a rather unctuously expressed tenderness for Cobden’s reputation; but though it suppressed his letter, it published some very unfriendly comments on it. Cobden protested against this with much vivacity. The merciful haze of time has effaced the interest of much of his letter, but some portion of it is relevant to still unsettled questions in the constitution of the literary priesthood.

The question concerns the Government on one side, and the leading London journal on the other. Does not that affect the public? Is the disposal of Government patronage—the appointment to posts which the public pay—a private or personal question? Recollect, I repeat, that the entire controversy between us is—whether or not the subject should be shrouded in secrecy. It is not the question of anonymous writing that is in debate. That is only the red herring drawn across the true scent. We all write anonymously, more or less. The only objection is to the masked literary assassin. Nor is it a question whether writers for the press have a right to their share of public appointments; nobody denies it. I do not even say that the stream of patronage ought not to flow to the Times office; I only content that it should not run underground.

Far from thinking that the class of whom we are speaking should be excluded from the public service, I form a very high estimate of the fitness for legislative and administrative function, of those who write for the political instruction of the people. And it is on this account that, while I deny to no one the right of an honest incognito, I regret that the prevalent, and perhaps unavoidable habit of anonymous writing in the metropolis, should entomb, for all practical political purposes, so much of our best intellect, and rob society of the full development of that individuality, which, more than all besides, is essential to the progress and elevation of our species. In the provinces, the anonymous system has, practically, up to a very recent period, never been in operation; because, there, every man’s occupation was more or less known to his neighbours. And, if space permitted, I could trace the salutary effect of this on the political progress of the last generation; for it would be easy to adduce the names of half a score of men, the conductors of journals in Leeds, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Manchester, Norwich, &c &c., to whose able, honest, and energetic efforts, as leaders of public opinion in their several localities, more than probably any other traceable cause, the nation is indebted for its successful resistance to that reactionary spirit, which, from the end of the last century, down to 1820, ran its course of tyrannical repression, and filled all but the stoutest hearts with despair. These men have all passed away, but they should not be forgotten. And if, when my friend Dr. smiles, himself a distinguished member of the fraternity, shall have completed his biographies of our great discoverers, and improvers in physical science, he should give us a volume of the lives of those pioneers of political progress, it will be seen that their triumphs are traceable to something more than an investment of capital in presses and type, with an impersonal editorial staff,—that they were in each case due to the open and avowed writing, and the personal example of the individual man, who was living in clear daylight, under the full gaze of his neighbours, whom he was not only stimulating, but leading in the path of duty, and by whom he was in turn cheered and sustained. I might also, if space allowed, refer to the advantages which open and avowed journalism might afford to the electoral body, in the choice of representatives of Parliament. Those members of the House of Commons connected with the public press, who have been elected during my experience, and who, with the exception of the first-named, were connected with provincial journals,—Messrs. Miall, Baines, Macguire, Fagan, Lucas, and others,—whatever may be the difference of opinion as to their views, will be acknowledged by all who have sat with them, as having been, in every case, among the foremost of their party, for political intelligence and honour.

I have said enough to show that I take a more exalted view than most men, of the mission of those who instruct the public through the newspaper press, and that, while asserting their title to the most honourable posts, I am assailing only a system by which they are huddled clandestinely into inferior employments, as the result of a secret and illicit intercourse with the Government of the day. And I revert to the question—has not the country a right to be informed, on my responsibility, that this illicit intercourse has been carried on between the Times and the Government; and is the Daily Telegraph Justified in intercepting from the public, so far as lies in its power, all knowledge of the fact, on the plea that it is a personal matter?

Here we may leave the subject, merely remarking that to the present writer it seems that the word “illicit” in the letter is entirely misplaced and unintelligible. There was only one way of effectually checking the excessive authority of a journal which had abused it; this was to encourage the establishment of competitors. Cobden did as much towards this desirable end as any one, by his share in the reduction of the paper duty, which was what made the cheap press possible. The multiplication of newspapers and periodicals has had the further effect of clearing away the old charlatanry and the mystery of authorship and editorship. The names of all important journalists are now coming to be practically as well known as the names of important members of Parliament, and this change has naturally been followed by that more careful sense of responsibility which Cobden was quite right in insisting upon.